AIDS
The AIDS epidemic began in the early 1980s and moved from gay men in the U.S. and Caribbean to both sexes and is now a worldwide epidemic. The relation between diet and acquired immune deficiency was largely ignored in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. In recent years, researchers have begun to focus on this connection, and, as in the case of heart disease and cancer, modern medicine is discovering that diet and nutrition are underlying factors in the spread of HIV and in the treatment of symptoms.
By 1999, an estimated 33 million people around the world were infected. The disease is spreading at the rate of 16,000 new infections per day. An estimated 27 million carriers are unaware of having the virus, UNAIDS, the United Nations agency in charge of controlling the disease reported. In 1997, 2.3 million people died of AIDS, nearly half of whom were women, and 460,000 cases involve children. More than 90 percent of the infections are in developing country.
In parts of Africa, one in four adults is infected with HIV and AIDS now rivals the world’s greatest epidemics, according to the United Nations. Twenty-one million carriers are infected in Africa. In 13 sub-Saharan countries, HIV has infected 10 percent of adults and 25 percent or more in Botswana and Zimbabwe. In comparison, the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed an estimated 20 million people, about one-quarter of Europe’s population, in four years. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed 20 million. In some African cities, the infection rate is one-third and in some prenatal clinics up to 70 percent of women tested carry HIV. Infection rates have been cut in some countries, such as Uganda, where the rate fell from 13 percent in 1994 to 9.5 percent in 1997. Thailand cut its rate from 2.7 percent to 2.3 percent in the same time. India with 4 million cases has the most number of infections in the world. In 1993, AIDS became the leading cause of death of Americans from 25 to 44.
• Macrobiotic Approach - In a study of diet and immune-deficiency disorders, including AIDS, two macrobiotic educators look at the emergence of HIV and other new viruses as a result of modern agricultural practices and patterns of food consumption that have disrupted traditional societies and ecosystems that have existed in harmony for thousands of years. HIV is believed to have acquired its virulence and elusiveness as a result of modern environmental and medical interventions, including monocropping, pesticide and chemical fertilizer use, and abuse of antibiotics and other drugs. As it made its way through depleted soil, a chemically weakened food chain, and immuno-suppressed blood systems, HIV gradually evolved into a stronger, more lethal virus.
Michio Kushi and Alex Jack also explore the possibility that some cases of AIDS are internally generated from the degeneration of cells into viruses as a result of dietary imbalance, especially high intake of sugar, sweets, fatty foods, oily and greasy foods, fruits, alcohol, and drugs and medications.
Source: Michio Kushi and Alex Jack, Humanity at the Crossroads, (Becket, MA: One Peaceful World Press, 1997).
• Controlling AIDS with Macrobiotics - In 1983 a group of men in New York City with AIDS began macrobiotics under the inspiration of Michio Kushi and Lawrence H. Kushi, D.Sc. They hoped to change their blood quality, recover their natural immunity, and survive this otherwise always fatal illness. In May, 1984, a research team led by Elinor N. Levy, Ph.D. and John C. Beldekas, Ph.D. of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Boston University’s School of Medicine and Martha C. Cottrell, M.D., Director of Student Health at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, began to monitor the blood samples and immune functions of ten men with Kaposi’s sarcoma (a usual symptom of AIDS). Preliminary results indicated that most of the men were stabilizing on the diet. “Survival in these men who have received little or no medical treatment appears to compare very favorably with that of KS patients in general. We suggest that physicians and scientists can feel comfortable in allowing patients, particularly those with minimal disease, to go untreated as part of a larger [dietary] study or because non-treatment is the patient’s choice.”
Source: “Patients with Kaposi Sarcoma Who Opt for No Treatment” [Letter], Lancet, July 1985.
• Strengthening Natural Immunity with Macrobiotics At the International AIDS Conference in Paris in June, 1986, Elinor Levy and associates presented further findings concerning the men with Kaposi’s sarcoma who had been practicing macrobiotics. he researchers concluded:
1. Lymphocyte number increases over the first two years from diagnosis with Kaposi’s sarcoma in men who are following a macrobiotic diet. A linear regression analysis model predicts that lymphocyte number becomes normal within this two-year period.
2. During this time period the percentage of T4 cells does not change. The percentage of T8 cells possibly decreases.
3. These results compare favorably with those from any of the medical treatments reported.
4. There are several possible explanations for these positive findings including: a) the macrobiotic diet and/or lifestyle is of benefit to men with Kaposi’s sarcoma. b) The decision to become and remain macrobiotic selects for men with a better prognosis.
Source: Elinor Levy, J. C. Beldekas, P. H. Black, and L. H. Kushi, “Patients with Kaposi’s Sarcoma Who Opt for Alternative Therapy,” International AIDS Conference, Paris, France, 1986.
• Decreasing AIDS Symptoms with Macrobiotics - In a further report on the men in the macrobiotic AIDS study, Dr. Levy reported in 1988: “The large majority of subjects reported a decrease in AIDS-related symptoms, particularly fatigue (23/29) and diarrhea (17/19). The lymphocyte number in the subgroup of 19 subjects with Kaposi’s sarcoma alone tended to increase with time after diagnosis. Only two of this group of 19 lost more than 10 percent of their body weight during their participation in the study which ranged from several months to more than three years. Nine of the nineteen with KS have died, seven are alive more than three years after diagnosis with KS.”
Source: Elinor M. Levy, Letter to the American Cancer Society, March 3, 1988.
• Improving T-Cell Ratios for AIDS with Macrobiotics - After initial observations, the macrobiotic AIDS test group was expanded to twenty men. “As a group, the men have had significant improvement in their total T-cell numbers, notably in T4 counts, although T4/T8 ratios have not changed significantly,” Martha Cottrell reported. “Those with Kaposi’s sarcoma have shown the best survival rates, three going five years or longer. The approach has demonstrated effective in managing their condition while minimizing opportunistic infections and use of toxic drugs. They are all working full time and enjoying a quality of life atypical of most AIDS patients. Most of all, they are relatively free of the sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and victimization which tends to take hold of other AIDS patients. Thus the physical benefits— prolonging life and improving the immunocompetence—seems complemented by a range of psychological benefits.”
Source: Martha Cottrell, Letter to the American Cancer Society, March 14, 1988. See also Tom Monte, The Way of Hope (New York: Warner Books, 1990).
• A Multifactoral Approach - Challenging the conventional view that AIDS is caused by a virus, Robert Root-Bernstein, a professor of physiology at Michigan State University, contends that the disease is the result of numerous synergistic insults to the immune system, including illicit and prescription drug use and improper diet. “HIV infection may be an epiphenomenon of immune suppression rather than a necessary cause,” he explains in his book Rethinking AIDS. “Immune suppression may predispose people to HIV infection (just as it predisposes them to other opportunistic infections) rather than resulting from such an infection.”
Reviewing medical history, he shows that probably cases of of AIDS long predate the current epidemic and there are a number of cases without HIV infection. Reviewing current medical research, he argues that it is very difficult for a healthy person to get AIDS, even following sexual contact with someone who tests positive for the virus. “Alternative hypotheses to AIDS provide alternative frameworks for interpreting as valid some otherwise unexplainable treatments or ‘cures.’ For example, a holistic approach to AIDS focusing on nutrition and behavior modification and emphasizing a positive mental image may bolster the immune system and simultaneously curtain exposure to drugs and infections, leading to improved health. This is a reasonable prediction of the cofactor and multifactorial theories of AIDS that differentiate them clearly from the HIV-only theory.”
Source: Robert Root-Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: Free Press, 1993).
• Lifestyle Factors - In a review of AIDS research between 1981 and 1990, a senior medical researcher speculated that AIDS may not be caused primarily by a virus but may be the result of immunosuppressive behavior and lifestyle, especially the abuse of drugs and medications and improper diet. Dr. Peter H. Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a pioneer in retrovirus research, concludes that AIDS is not a single infectious disease or syndrome but a set of separate conditions with different risk factors.
He cites the use of nitrite inhalants or “poppers” and other aphrodisiac drugs as well as prior use of alcohol, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, valium, and amphetamines as chief causes of loss of natural immunity in the gay community. In Africa, where AIDS is commonly known as “Slim Disease,” he noted that it does not appear to be contagious but rather fits the profile of malnutrition, apparently caused in part by modern foods.
The use of AZT, an anti-HIV drug, should be discontinued, he concludes, because it only weakens the immune system. “Doctors should treat each condition separately, and should seek to determine the underlying causes in each individual’s case; patients should insist on this approach from their doctors. But perhaps the most useful action for any such patient to take would be the ending of any risk behavior. Unfortunately, no studies have been done, but anecdotal case descriptions exist of AIDS patients who recover after ending drug use, sexual promiscuity, and prophylactic antibiotic use, and who improve their nutritional status.” Among the cases cited are thirteen AIDS survivors, including some who practiced macrobiotics, who have lived more than five years since their diagnosis.
Source: Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison, Policy Review, Summer, 1990, pp. 40-51 and Peter H. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996).
• Nutritional Research - In the first epidemiological study to assess dietary intake in homosexual men testing positive for AIDS, researchers in California found that the consumption of foods or supplements high in iron, vitamin E, and riboflavin significantly delayed the onset of symptoms. Vitamin C, thiamine, and niacin intake also approached levels of offering protection. “Additional studies are needed to determine whether dietary intake modifies the rate of developing AIDS in those who are HIV seropositive,” researchers concluded.
Source: B. Abrams et al., “A Prospective Study of Dietary Intake and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in HIV-Seropositive Homosexual Men,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes 6:949-58, 1993.
• AIDS and Maternal Nutrition - In the first study to show that maternal nutrition can affect the transmission of AIDS, researchers in Africa reported that a deficiency in vitamin A (found in dark green leafy vegetables, carrots, and tropical fruits, as well as some animal products) can increase transmission of HIV, the virus associated with AIDS. In a study of 567 pregnant women in Mawali infected with HIV, women with the most severe deficiency in vitamin A had a 32 percent chance of transmitting HIV to their babies, as compared to 7 percent with healthy amounts of vitamin A. The researchers further found that 93 percent of babies born to mothers with the most severe deficiencies died in the first year, compared with 14 percent of those born to mothers with healthy levels of vitamin A. Dr. Richard D. Semba of Johns Hopkins Hospital, leader of the research team, said that nutritional deficiency could explain why the AIDS epidemic has spread so much more extensively in Africa than in the U.S. or Europe.
Source: Richard D. Semba, “”Maternal Nutrition and Vitamin A Deficiency and Child Growth Failure during Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus Infection,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Human Retrovirology 14(3): 219-22, 1997.
• Breast-milk Inhibits HIV - Breastmilk contains a substance that prevents HIV infection, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Shriver Center for Mental Retardation. In laboratory tests, the mother’s milk component dramatically inhibited the ability of an HIV protein to adhere to white blood cells, a binding mechanism that leads to infection. Even though breast-feeding can transmit HIV in some cases, the researchers concluded, that it was warranted in developing countries by women carrying the virus. The World Health Organization sanctions breastfeeding by HIV-positive mothers, but recommends that each case be determined individually.
Source: Richard Saltus, “Breast Milk Component May Cub HIV Spread, Scientists Say,” Boston Globe, March 7, 1995.
• AIDS and Vitamin B-12 - Vitamin B-12 deficiency is associated with AIDS, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. In a study of 310 men with HIV, scientists found that those with normal levels of the vitamin remained free of the disease for about 8 years compared with four years for those low in this nutrient. B-12 plays a role in protein and DNA synthesis and strengthens cognitive and immune functions.
Source: E. Smith et al., “Dietary Intake of Community-Based HIV-1 Seropositive and Seronegative Injecting Drug Users,” Journal of Nutrition 12(7-8): 496-501, 1996.
• Was HIV Genetically Engineered? Investigating the possibility that AIDS, Ebola, and other new diseases are the result of biological weapons experiments, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, a dentist and medical re-searcher who has served on the faculties of Harvard and Tufts universities, researched the U.S. biological warfare program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which received a $10 million authorization in the early 1970s to develop a genetically-altered retrovirus that would destroy the human-immune system as part of the “Special Virus Cancer Program.”
He quotes Dr. MacArthur, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Defense, who stated in classified Congressional testimony in 1970: “Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”
The secret biological warfare program was overseen by Dr. Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations; carried out by the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Sharp, and Dohme, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, and Litton Bionetics, the nation’s largest bioweapons contractor; and involved Dr. Robert Gallo, the cancer virus researcher who went on to become the co-discoverer of HIV over a decade later.
Clandestine research, Horowitz theorizes, date back even further. In 1967, a lethal virus broke out in Germany and Yugoslavia among vaccine researchers. The epidemic, known as Marburg disease, was attributed to infected monkeys that had been brought to Europe from Africa. Horowitz traces the monkeys to a Litton medical research laboratory in Africa. The facility was located in an area of southeast Zaire that was secretly leased until the year 2000 to OTRAG, a German corporation with ties to NATO, the CIA, and Litton. The official purpose of OTRAG’s contract was to launch private communication satellites, but biowar experiments and other covert military activities may also have been conducted in this remote area (which is twice the size of England). In 1976, Ebola—the extremely contagious, highly lethal viral disease that is genetically identical to Marburg—broke out in Central Africa. It is in this “thinly populated” region—inhabited by 760,000 Africans—over which OT-RAG was granted “complete sovereignty and control” that AIDS also may have first emerged.
Horowitz speculates that fear of communism, black nationalism, and overpopulation (especially in neighboring Angola, which bordered Zaire and was a center of revolutionary political movements) fueled these medical experiments. (Ebola also broke out in South Africa whose apartheid-era government was committed to overthrowing Angola.) Through the late 1970s, USAID vaccination teams immunized more than 20 million people in Central Africa. In 1978-79, several years before AIDS appeared in America, Horowitz claims that the New York City Blood Center introduced an experimental hepatitis B vaccine in the gay male community which may have contained HIV or a monkey virus that mutated into HIV.
Dr. W. John Martin, director of the Center for Complex Infectious Diseases in Rosemead, Calif., and former director of the Viral Oncology Branch of the FDA’s Bureau of Biologics, the government’s principal agency in charge of vaccines, also suspects a contaminated vaccine of human origin gave rise to AIDS. “The mixing of vaccine viruses with others found in the cells and tissues used to develop the vaccine can potentially lead to the development of new recombinant mutants that are more adaptive and have wider host range than either of the original viruses,” he explains.
While Martin calls for analysis of the genetic components of vaccines used in early field trials in Africa containing monkey components, Dr. Robert Strecker, another AIDS researcher, contends that genetically HIV resembles bovine lymphotrophic virus (BLV) cultured in cows. He theorizes “the virus either mutated in cattle and sheep and then was artificially adapted to humans by growing in human tissue cultures . . . or the virus was actually constructed in a laboratory by gene manipulation.”
Source: Leonard G. Horowitz, Emerging Viruses AIDS & Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? (Rockport, MA: Tetrahedron, 1997).
• AIDS Spread in Africa Vastly Overestimated - A growing number of African public health officials and researchers have expressed concern that World Health Organization estimates of AIDS in Africa are vastly overestimated because of an alarmingly high rates of false positive HIV results in populations tested. Moreover, the symptoms of AIDS, including weight loss, chronic diarrhea, high fever, and persistent coughing, are common to dysentery, tuberculosis, cholera, and other infectious diseases.
Some African scientists who question these results are worried that the claims of a continental AIDS pandemic in Africa will be used to justify massive, unregulated vaccine and drug testing programs using Africans as guinea pigs. Rather than behavior modification schemes, they suggest that governments and international agencies focus on structural poverty and unhealthy living conditions, including better nutrition and preventive health care.
Source: Richard Horton, “Truth and Heresy about AIDS,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 1996.