Science Follow

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has killed more than twenty-five million people and remains a major threat to humankind (UNAIDS 2006). The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes AIDS by undermining the immune system, eventually resulting in death (Simon et al. 2006). Although no cure has been discovered, scientific advances have resulted in the development of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (Brocklehurst 2006) and to extend the lives of AIDS patients (Smit et al. 2006). HIV has been isolated and photographed, and its genome has been fully described. Yet a group of AIDS denialists in Australia (the so-called Perth Group) insists that HIV does not exist—recently testifying to this effect in an Australian court in defense of Andre Parenzee, an HIV-positive man charged with having unprotected sex with several women and infecting one of them with HIV. Other AIDS denialists accept the existence of HIV but, following Peter Duesberg (a molecular biologist at the University of California), believe it to be harmless. What unites them all is the unshakable belief that the existing canon of AIDS science is wrong and that AIDS deaths are caused by malnutrition, narcotics, and ARV drugs themselves.