LA Porn Sets Shut Down

[UhOh]

Come on, people. We're not in 1982 when HIV meant AIDS then death. While no one *wants* HIV, this whole attitude of thinking hiv = end of the world, AIDS, horrible death. No one (at least in developed countries) gets AIDS anymore and people with hiv now will die of old age like most of us.

hiv is now considered a chronic illness - not a terminal disease.

Teaching complacency of a deadly disease is a dangerous message. According to the CDC website 17,000 people in the US died of aids in 2009.
HIV may be a chronic illness for some, as long as they're able to come up with the $2000 - $5000 per month for the rest of their lives for treatment.

 

[PlayfulAlex]

Thank you for mentioning this, LuckyDick. While it is a highly controversial topic, no one should be forming opinions about HIV and AIDS without at least viewing this documentary with as open a mind as they can muster:

HIV: Fact or Fraud?

 

[Miss*Bijou]

Teaching complacency of a deadly disease is a dangerous message. According to the CDC website 17,000 people in the US died of aids in 2009.
HIV may be a chronic illness for some, as long as they're able to come up with the $2000 - $5000 per month for the rest of their lives for treatment.

Where did I 'teach complacency'? In Canada, the treatment is definitely not thousands of $$ each month and it's affordable to everyone.

Perhaps I should have been more specific that no one with hiv who is being treated and on medication , dies of Aids anymore. In Canada and most developed countries, there is assistance from the state and people DO NOT pay $5000/minth on drugs.

I didn't say we should be complacent or that it's not a big deal but I did say w need to stop thinking of it with an irrational fear based on what we were told decades ago. People who are diagnosed with hiv, who decide to get treatment, can and do live long healthy lives. That's not complacency, that's reality.

 

[Miss*Bijou]

HIV is not a death sentence

the logic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB8g0b-FkW0


a Nobel Prize winner talks about what is going on

Thank you for mentioning this, LuckyDick. While it is a highly controversial topic, no one should be forming opinions about HIV and AIDS without at least viewing this documentary with as open a mind as they can muster:

HIV: Fact or Fraud?

I know Alex
People get soooo angry with info that might break their paradigm.

HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses do not cause disease
HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses are not sexually transmittable
HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses do not kill their hosts
HIV is a retrovirus.......

Really? Are we really going there? How does that add anything useful to the topic? Hiv-AIDS denialism... Like we really need that. Come on!!!

HIV/AIDS denialism is the view held by a loosely connected group of people and organizations who deny that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). [1] Some denialists reject the existence of HIV, while others accept that HIV exists but say that it is a harmless passenger virus and not the cause of AIDS. Insofar as denialists acknowledge AIDS as a real disease, they attribute it to some combination of sexual behavior, recreational drugs, malnutrition, poor sanitation, hemophilia, or the effects of the drugs used to treat HIV infection. [2][3]

The scientific community considers the evidence that HIV causes AIDS to be conclusive [4][5] and rejects AIDS-denialist claims as pseudoscience based on conspiracy theories, [6] faulty reasoning, cherry picking, and misrepresentation of mainly outdated scientific data. [4][5][7] With the rejection of these arguments by the scientific community, AIDS-denialist material is now targeted at less scientifically sophisticated audiences and spread mainly through the Internet. [8][9]

Despite its lack of scientific acceptance, HIV/AIDS denialism has had a significant political impact, especially in South Africa under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. Scientists and physicians have raised alarm at the human cost of HIV/AIDS denialism, which discourages HIV-positive people from using proven treatments. [5][6][8][10][11][12] Public health researchers have attributed 330,000 to 340,000 AIDS deaths, along with 171,000 other HIV infections and 35,000 infant HIV infections, to the South African government's former embrace of HIV/AIDS denialism.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism

 

[UhOh]

HIV is not a death sentence

the logic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB8g0b-FkW0


a Nobel Prize winner talks about what is going on

Well done, there's your proof. A 20yr old video from a surfer dude thats never done any research on the topic. But he has a Nobel prize in an unrelated topic so makes him an expert in all topics.

Some people really have their mind made up as to what they want to believe and they'll accept support from whatever quack that will give it.

Do you also believe 911 was an inside job?

 

[UhOh]

He did years of research????????

Show me the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS

Should be easy right?

Show me a paper he's published related to aids research

Should be just as easy right?

 

[Miss*Bijou]

Hi Miss*Bijou,

As you have two friends that are currently fighting, could you ask and publish the amount they do pay for the drugs?
From this thread we go from "Affordable" to “$5,000/mo” and that leaves a lot of room for the actual cost.

I am thinking about just regular medical, no extended as not everyone has extended medical and even of you do, policies differ.

I am sure that most SP’s and pooners can shrug off the cost, but there are families in this province that can not even feed their kids properly, $100/mo could break them.

Obviously there's a different between what medication may cost and what people pay. I don't know how it works anywhere else but I know both BC and Quebec, which is where my friends live, have provincial assistance programs for medication costs. I realize $100 may make the difference but that also applies to people who have to take medication for a variety of other illnesses. However, just now looking at BC's Pharmacare website, I see there is a specific plan for HIV/AIDS medication assistance:

Antiretroviral medications through the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS
(Plan X)

The B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS operates from St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, B.C. HIV-positive persons living in British Columbia receive their antiretroviral drugs free of charge when enrolled with the centre.

The centre is fully supported by the B.C. Ministry of Health and B.C. PharmaCare funds the eligible drug costs for the centre.

St. Paul's Hospital is a leading institution providing care to more than 65% of the seropositive people in the province.

The centre provides education to health care providers, conducts natural history and observational studies, develops innovative laboratory tests, and carries out clinical trials. Its drug program is at the core of the centre's activities. For more information, visit the Centre for Excellence website.

A quick search on the linked site and I found this:

The Drug Treatment Program (DTP) is an innovative research and treatment program designed to ensure that all medically eligible persons living with HIV in British Columbia have access to free antiretroviral therapy.

Established in 1992, the DTP currently provides nearly 5,500 patients with access to life-saving drugs.

One of the foundational programs of the BC-CfE, the Drug Treatment Program is funded by the provincial government (PharmaCare) to distribute anti-HIV drugs based on guidelines generated by the Therapeutic Guidelines Committee. Information from all participants is entered into a database, providing data for clinical and virological outcome studies of patients receiving antiretroviral therapy. This database acts as a registry of all HIV-treating physicians in the province, as well as an "early warning system" to alert government about the trajectory of the disease.


Eligibility

Persons meeting the following criteria are eligible for enrolment in the BC-CfE HIV Drug Treatment Program:

Documented HIV infection and clinically meets the current criteria for treatment with antiretroviral medication (as specified in the BC-CfE Therapeutic Guidelines)

AND

BC resident with Medical Services Plan (MSP) coverage (active BC Personal Health Number) or Interim Federal Health coverage (refugee status) or active medical plan coverage from another Canadian Province, while awaiting active MSP coverage.

Without sounding too cynical, it would appear that (at least in BC, though I have a feeling it's not unique to BC) you're better off if what you need is HIV medication than, say, you have diabetes.. are on birth control....or just about any other medication.

 

[Miss*Bijou]

I know Alex
People get soooo angry with info that might break their paradigm.

HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses do not cause disease
HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses are not sexually transmittable
HIV is a retrovirus
Retroviruses do not kill their hosts
HIV is a retrovirus.......

Your attitude is sad.
You can't argue what you don't understand!

LOL Really, don't be sad for me. Use it up on yourself - you clearly need it a lot more than I do.

But knock yourself out....



<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DShCZTbHEhk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Long considered a contrarian by his scientific colleagues, Duesberg began to gain public notoriety with a March 1987 article in Cancer Research entitled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality". In this and subsequent writings, Duesberg proposed his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or antiretroviral drugs, and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. The scientific consensus is that HIV is the causal pathogen that leads to AIDS;

Duesberg's HIV/AIDS claims have been rejected as incorrect and disproven by the scientific community. Reviews of his opinions in Nature and Science asserted that they were unpersuasive and based on selective reading of the literature, and that although Duesberg had a right to a dissenting opinion, his failure to fairly review evidence that HIV causes AIDS meant that his opinion lacked credibility.

Duesberg's views on HIV/AIDS are cited as major influences on South African policy under the administration of Thabo Mbeki. Duesberg served on an advisory panel to Mbeki, convened in 2000. The failure of South Africa to provide antiretroviral drugs in a timely manner, due in part to the influence of AIDS denialism, is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable AIDS deaths and HIV infections. Duesberg disputed these findings in an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses, but the journal's publisher, Elsevier, later retracted the article over accuracy and ethics concerns as well as its rejection during peer review.

...

The Durban Declaration was drafted and signed by over 5,000 scientists and physicians, describing the evidence that HIV causes AIDS as "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous."

Two independent studies have concluded that the public health policies of Thabo Mbeki's government, shaped in part by Duesberg's writings and advice, were responsible for over 330,000 excess AIDS deaths and many preventable infections, including those of infants.

A 2008 Discover Magazine feature on Duesberg addresses Duesberg's role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. Jeanne Linzer interviews prominent HIV/AIDS expert Max Essex, who suggests that, “ ...history will judge Duesberg as either "a nut who is just a tease to the scientific community" or an "enabler to mass murder" for the deaths of many AIDS patients in Africa.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg

AIDS contrarian ignored warnings of scientific misconduct

A controversial scientist who is under investigation at the University of California, Berkeley, for making false claims in a paper and failing to declare a colleague's alleged conflict of interest ignored an earlier warning that he could face misconduct charges if the paper was published.

Earlier this month, molecular and cell biologist Peter Duesberg told the ScienceInsider policy blog that the publication of his paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses prompted two letters of complaint to Berkeley. After receiving the letters, the institution opened a misconduct investigation.

But Duesberg had earlier submitted the paper for publication in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS), and a review of the paper, seen by Nature, explicitly warns Duesberg that "cherry-picking" of results and a co-author's "obvious conflict of interest" could lead to misconduct charges if the paper were to be published. Despite the warnings, Duesberg chose to publish the paper in Medical Hypotheses, which does not peer review submissions.


http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100504/full/news.2010.210.html

David Rasnick has worked with Matthias Rath in South Africa, where they have emphasized the purported risks of antiretroviral therapy and urged HIV/AIDS patients to use vitamin and nutritional supplements instead. David Rasnick and the Rath Foundation became the subject of a lawsuit by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa. The lawsuit was brought as a result of clinical trials conducted by David Rasnick and the Rath Foundation that were not approved by the appropriate authorities in South Africa and did not undergo any ethical review. The trials involved recruiting poor black South Africans with HIV, instructing them not to take effective antiretrovirals, and providing them instead with vitamin supplements. These trials resulted in at least five deaths known to TAC, and possibly up to twelve.

In June, 2008, the South African Cape High Court ruled against Rasnick and other defendants associated with the Rath Foundation, declaring their vitamin trials illegal and prohibiting the publication of false advertisements for vitamins. The Court also stated that health authorities in South Africa have an obligation to investigate and stop illegal activities of Rasnick and the Rath Foundation.

-----

David Rasnick has claimed to be a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. However, in response to a 2006 editorial in which David Rasnick claimed affiliation with the university, the chairman of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley wrote:

" I understand David Rasnick claimed an affiliation with our department in an article. David Rasnick has no affiliation with the University of California, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. One should obviously be concerned that someone who misrepresents his own affiliation might also misrepresent data and arguments in other areas. "


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rasnick

http://www.aidstruth.org/features/2009/david-rasnick-fails-declare-conflict-interests

I mean, REALLY!

AIDS denial: A lethal delusion

ON 27 December 2008, a well-heeled 52-year-old woman died in a Los Angeles hospital. Her death certificate describes a body riddled with opportunistic infections typical of the late stages of AIDS. Christine Maggiore had tested HIV positive 16 years earlier, but she had shunned ART, the antiretroviral therapy that stops HIV replicating and prevents AIDS.

This was not the first time a death in Maggiore's family had made headlines: three years earlier her 3-year-old daughter Eliza Jane had died. The autopsy described a chronically ill little girl who was underweight, under-height, and had encephalitis and pneumonia - all AIDS-related. When pregnant, Maggiore had again rejected ART and she had breastfed Eliza Jane, another way of transmitting the virus.

Why, in 21st-century California, would a middle-class woman and her young daughter die like this when there is tried-and-tested treatment for their illness? The answer lies in a bizarre medical conspiracy theory ...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227131.500-aids-denial-a-lethal-delusion.html

AIDS denialism relies, in part, on the dogmatic repetition of the misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or mischaracterization of certain scientific studies. Below are some examples which show how denialists typically twist the facts and distort reality.

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/misuse




Debunking denialist myths

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/myths




What we know about AIDS
What we know about AIDS explains the essential science of HIV succinctly and clearly. It was originally published as a chapter in Debunking Delusions by Nathan Geffen. With the permission of the author, Nathan Geffen, and the book's publisher, Jacana, we are now releasing this chapter..

http://www.aidstruth.org/sites/aidstruth.org/files/whatweknowaboutaids.pdf




The Science of HIV/AIDS: Supporting information

http://www.aidstruth.org/science/supporting_info

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/hivaids/understanding/howhivcausesaids/pages/hivcausesaids.aspx



More about denialists, including Paul Duesberg & David Rasnick

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/denialists

Our objective is to provide factual information on HIV/AIDS and to counter the misrepresentations made by AIDS denialists. We also point to the harm caused by AIDS denialism (and by those who profit from it by selling unproven remedies) and alert appropriate organizations and appropriate authorities to the conduct of AIDS denialists when they breach the normal standards of professional ethics and competence.

We will not engage in any public or private debate with AIDS denialists or respond to requests from journalists who overtly support AIDS denialist causes. This is because there is no legitimate debate: the peer-reviewed scientific literature proves that HIV causes AIDS, AIDS kills, and AIDS can be treated with significant success by the use of antiretroviral therapy. AIDS denialists ignore, misunderstand and willfully misrepresent the scientific facts and hence there is no point debating them.

Debating denialists would dignify their dangerous position in a way that is unjustified by the facts about HIV/AIDS. The appropriate way for dissenting scientists to try to persuade other scientists of their views on any scientific subject is by publishing research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. For many years now, AIDS denialists have been unsuccessful in persuading credible peer-reviewed journals to accept their views on HIV/AIDS, because of their scientific implausibility and factual inaccuracies. That failure does not entitle those who disagree with the scientific consensus on a life-and-death public health issue to then attempt to confuse the general public by creating the impression that scientific controversy exists when it does not.


Resources for countering AIDS denialists

This site was created to help prevent lives from being lost due to ignorance or misunderstanding. The items below address some of the most common assertions made by AIDS denialists.


http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/answering_denialists

Believe whatever nonsense you want but please stop wasting everyone's time...

 

[Tugela]

"Well done, there's your proof. A 20yr old video from a surfer dude thats never done any research on the topic. But he has a Nobel prize in an unrelated topic so makes him an expert in all topics.

Some people really have their mind made up as to what they want to believe and they'll accept support from whatever quack that will give it.

Do you also believe 911 was an inside job? "

He did years of research????????

Show me the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS

Should be easy right?

Ok, here is the short version for idiots:

HIV is a slow replicating virus that infects cells by binding to the CD4 receptor, which (if understand it correctly) is expressed primarily on T-cells and some other cells associated with the immune system.

This infection eventually kills those cells. It doesn't immediately wipe them out because, it replicates slowly and a portion of the viral population can lie dormant in cells for a long time. If it was a fast replicating virus the people infected would die very quickly.

The constant killing of these cells leads to attrition and eventually depressed levels of these cells.

Depressed levels of these cells leads to depressed immune responses (since these cells are responsible for immune responses).

Depressed immune responses results in higher probability of infection, including rare infections not normally a problem in healthy individuals.

It is these infections that make HIV infected people sick, and eventually causes their deaths.

HIV itself does not make people sick, but it allows them to become sick from other infections much more readily than the general population.

 

[PlayfulAlex]

I'm just curious as to why what one person or group believes is OK, and yet what another person or group believes is a waste of time.

Don't they both get equal time?

 

[HankQuinlan]

I'm just curious as to why what one person or group believes is OK, and yet what another person or group believes is a waste of time.

Don't they both get equal time?

No they don't. Opinions and beliefs are one thing; anybody can believe what they want, no matter how misguided they may be. When they publicize their beliefs, they are subject to scrutiny. Research and facts trump opinions and beliefs. Otherwise, it enters the realm of religion, where belief does not require evidence.