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But, at least once, smallpox was used directly as a weapon. This was the infamous case of General Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, for which Amherst Massachusetts is named. The good general was in command of troops in the Ohio area. Certain native tribes in the area had become increasingly hostile. In response, the general wrote a letter to a subordinate outlining a plan to "Extirpate this Execrable Race" via the dispensation of smallpox-infected blankets.
The order was carried out with military efficiency. A smallpox epidemic duly took hold amongst the tribes. Mortality was very high. Some tribal groups virtually vanished, and the rest suffered severe population losses. The virus did a very thorough job in breaking the rebellion.
Originally posted by dietsamcola
Well if aids was meant for population control, it's not doing a very good job.
6 billion people on the planet
33 million people living with aids
2 million people die of aids each year
Not exactly thinning the herd. Additionally, the majority of these deaths are in poor countries. Aids is much less prevalent in developed countries like America.
The rest of that page was simply a summary of Gallo's earlier work with the leukaemia-linked HTLV-I. It said: ‘epidemiologic data strongly suggests AIDS is caused by an infectious agent' but presented none of this data to support this. But when I turned the page, I was riveted. Gallo had deleted a statement by Popovic saying: 'Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.' (images in book - scanned copies of the words as typed by Popovic and changed by Gallo) This was totally unexpected. Nothing I read had led me to expect this. No one had mentioned these deleted words. Not Crewdson, not any of the investigators, no history of AIDS science. No one had reported these words, let alone their deletion by Gallo."
Originally posted by bluedrake
This is not the first time I have heard this story.
The only thing that really confused me about the statement that it was man made is, why would you make a disease that took a few years to kill the person?
Originally posted by bluedrake
This is not the first time I have heard this story.
The only thing that really confused me about the statement that it was man made is, why would you make a disease that took a few years to kill the person?
Originally posted by PsychoX42
Originally posted by bluedrake
This is not the first time I have heard this story.
The only thing that really confused me about the statement that it was man made is, why would you make a disease that took a few years to kill the person?
The real question is, if the medical industry is trying to make money, why wouldn't they make a disease which takes years to kill?
Think of all the money that the medical industry makes on vaccinations, treatments, etc. If you string a person along for years, you milk them dry of everything that they're worth. Imagine if you did this on a massive scale? 1+1=2
The best thing the medical industry could ever do FOR THEMSELVES is make the perfect disease without "a cure;" especially if they're thinking in long-term profits.
I thought most people would have already thought of this.
[edit on 3-8-2010 by PsychoX42]
You mean, the ones you could find a "virusmyth.com" link for, right?
I quoted and touched on every part of your post.
The "claims" made on that site are easily explained by basic science. I'll go through them right now for you, if that will stop you from posting further screed.
First link: This article, written by Etienne de Harven is nothing but more of Dr. de Harven's insane ramblings.
This man, working with President Mbeki, has cause the deaths of nearly half a million Africans due to his denialist views.
As for the material of the article, he misleads the audience by constantly referring to technology and biology from the 1970s and early 1980s, rather than modern technology and biological markers being used at the time of the article's writing, 2003.
Why would he do that? Could it be because he knows that using modern references would destroy his argument?
Second link: The author of this link mischaracterizes the papers they are citing. They claim the two papers are meant to show "isolates" of HIV, when really, if you look at the actual papers (linked at the bottom of the article) they are meant to show that microvesicles can and do often contaminate the samples, adding an extra consideration to future research. The articles are not, however, claiming that these images are isolates of HIV, nor are they calling into question previous images of HIV.
"They bear only the vaguest resemblance to retroviral particles. For sure they look more like retroviral particles than all the other particles and material but even if they looked identical to retroviral particles you cannot say they are a retrovirus. Even Gallo admits to the existence of particles which band at 1.16 gm/ml and which have the appearances and biochemical properties of retroviruses but which are not retroviruses because they are incapable of replicating."
The authors of these studies concede that their pictures reveal the vast majority of the material in the density gradient is cellular contamination.
Third link: This is nothing but a press release, citing no sources, referencing no data, no studies, no images, no...anything. You might as well have just posted an editorial.
Fourth link: Again, another press release with no data, no soruces, no anything. It's simply a statement explaining that one scientist has claimed there is no isolated HIV, but he provides no rebuttal to any of the currently standing science. Once again, nothing but an editorial.
Due to lack of evidence of "HIV" having been isolated, and due to the fact that after 15 years, work there is still no sound demonstration in the medical literature proving that a retrovirus named "HIV" is the cause of what is called "AIDS", the "HIV-AIDS hypothesis" has failed.
Fifth link: Same scientist, this time actually trying to support his argument.
He claims that because the "Pasteur method" wasn't followed (a method which hasn't been used for decades due to it's cumbersome, inefficient approach), HIV can't be said to exist.
He then goes on to make wild claims about reverse transcriptase not being specific, and that the Western blots for HIv glycoproteins were falsified, all of which he justifies through small snippet quotes from sources, most of which he is taking out of context to support his claims.
Sixth link: Same article, just summarised. The scientist also dismissed an HIV isolate because he didn't like how they looked in a sucrose gradient, showing his obvious ignorance to the fact that the process of getting such a particle in a sucrose gradient can affect the membrane and protein projections. Maybe he should have spent a little more time in the lab and less time on conspiracy sites.
Extracellular virion purification and sucrose density gradients were performed as described (9–11). From each sucrose gradient, 0.5- to 1-ml fractions were collected; 60 μl was used for RT activity assay, and the rest was mixed with 1 volume of buffer containing 4 M guanidinium thiocyanate, 0.5% N-lauroyl sarcosin, 25 mM EDTA, and 0.2% 2-mercaptoethanol adjusted to pH 5.5 with acetic acid. These mixtures were frozen at −80°C for further RNA extraction or were directly processed according to Chomczynski (13). RNA was dissolved in 20–50 μl of diethyl-pyrocarbonate-treated water in the presence of 1–2 μl of recombinant RNase-inhibitor (Promega) and 0.1 mM DTT. Aliquots (10 μl) were used for each RT-PCR.
Seventh link: A discussion board post (really?) that claims proteins don't crystallize in the human body (false) and that they function through vibration (false). If your source has two lies back to back, I toss it. Sorry.
So, I've addressed all seven of your articles. Can you address a single one of mine, now?
I learned at a medical school, a university hospital, and now a public hospital.
Statistics are absolutely vital to diagnosis. Nothing is as simple as "oh, the patient has these three symptoms, it must be this disease". Every single patient is a veritable stew of conditions, diseases, infections, and unique responses. You have to look at the data you can gather from physical exams, bloodwork, and imaging, and then decide what, statistically, is most likely to be wrong with them. If five of the symptoms point to esophageal cancer, but four also point to strep throat, you order an imaging study to rule out esophageal cancer immediately, rather than waiting a month to see if antibiotics clear up what might be strep.
An average of 195,000 people in the USA died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002, according to a new study of 37 million patient records that was released today by HealthGrades, the healthcare quality company.
The HealthGrades study applied the mortality and economic impact models developed by Dr. Chunliu Zhan and Dr. Marlene R. Miller in a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in October of 2003. The Zhan and Miller study supported the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 1999 report conclusion, which found that medical errors caused up to 98,000 deaths annually and should be considered a national epidemic.
The HealthGrades study finds nearly double the number of deaths from medical errors found by the 1999 IOM report "To Err is Human," with an associated cost of more than $6 billion per year. Whereas the IOM study extrapolated national findings based on data from three states, and the Zhan and Miller study looked at 7.5 million patient records from 28 states over one year, HealthGrades looked at three years of Medicare data in all 50 states and D.C. This Medicare population represented approximately 45 percent of all hospital admissions (excluding obstetric patients) in the U.S. from 2000 to 2002.
"If the Center for Disease Control's annual list of leading causes of death included medical errors, it would show up as number six, ahead of diabetes, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and renal disease," continued Dr. Collier. "Hospitals need to act on this, and consumers need to arm themselves with enough information to make quality-oriented health care choices when selecting a hospital."
Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year. Read more: www.time.com...