Amazing the information posted since my last post. I don't believe a bit of it, and I read all of this years ago, and I damn guarantee you, I
researched it too. Found all of it was hoaxes, and I have the opinion the hoaxes were purposefully created to kill as many people as possible. There's
your conspiracy. And its funny when you research the AIDS denialists, you find most of them died...of AIDS.
There is no way that one person like me can make an argument about the misconceptions, people have their hard opinions, and few of them have any
knowledge or experience with the disease. Some even have their own bias because they think it can only come from gay sex. And my guess is that there
are few with the knowledge, personal experience, backbone, and nerve to jump in and try to make a good argument against attitudes.
And especially the heterosexuals, as they try to avoid the shame. I am treated well by my specialist, but if I go to have some common disorder treated
by another specialist, I get grilled and shamed. I had to stop a doctor from performing surgery after he said he was looking for herpes and CMV in my
stomach (with T-cell counts of 1300, it was not even a remote possibility of CMV, so I knew the doctor was fully biased and I was not even beginning
to go under the knife with that kind of attitude cutting ME up). Another doctor wanted to test me for syphillis and gonohrrea when I went to emergency
room for a spider bite! My brother brought me in and the nurse assumed he was my 'partner'. I know the shame inflicted on us and I FIGHT it.
Its getting better but by NO means is it gone. Everyone remembers the ACT UP demonstrations of the early 90's when gays invaded Congress and demanded
FDA fast-track on new drugs (damn glad they fought the fight or the drugs would probably still be in testing now - some people may think the gay
community was demanding favorable treatment...but they were hopeless at the time and had to do SOMETHING or the public would have just ignored them).
I have met the most recent director of ACT UP several years ago at a heterosexual conference. SHE is a middle-aged housewife with 4 kids and a
professional career. She successfully spearheaded the campaign against Coca-Cola to make them give treatment to their employees in South Africa. Some
heterosexuals have the nerve to speak. But VERY few. Way too much risk.
Some misconceptions I will try to sort out (and no I won't even touch the Dr. Graves hoax it is too ridiculous):
Magic Johnson - sure he is healthy, and sure he has money. That's a good thing for him. The drugs he takes (the same ones I take) are $4500 for
a three month supply. No miracle or secret government cure there. They work. But the expense is crippling for people like me that pay for them.
Africa infections vs. US infections - for those that wonder why it was a 'gay' disease in the US but a 'heterosexual disease' in Africa? A
simple answer that has been known for two decades - circumcision! The male-female path is well known, and male-male is obvious, but why is it so hard
for males to get it from females? Because the male sexual organ has NO exposed immune cells with the CD4 and CCR5 receptor...unless the male is NOT
circumcised, then the make has millions of Langherns' cells in the foreskin that can carry the virus to the bloodstream. The uncircumcised male is
8-10 times more likely to contract it from a female if they are 'natural'. Took me six months to figure this out, then I found a study in Uganda done
by French researchers; the study was halted halfway thru when it became obvious that the uncircumcised male control group were getting infected at a
high rate and the circumcised male group had NO infections. Ttwo more studies were performed over the years after, and those two studies were also
terminated halfway thru for the same reason. Clinics in Africa have been overloaded ever since with males demanding circumcision.
Now the real conspiracy - why is a group in San Franscisco seeking to make circumcision illegal? Why has this been pushed as an unnecessary
'religious' procedure for the last 20 years? Because there are groups in the US that wish to increase the infection rate among heterosexuals to get
more attention to the disease and a greater push for a cure (my opinion)! Sad for me but when you are born to a poor family with birth defects, some
common procedures are skipped for economic reasons. Funny how this 'religious' procedure has more to do with biology than religion. Maybe the
'morality' taught in the Bible has more to do with biology than morality? I think there was a lot more wisdom in the old ways than we know....
The 'poisoning' from the drugs? Sure, there were many that died from the side effects in the early years. That was easy to figure out. Until 1996, the
goal was to eradicate the virus, so the dosages were high, and the therapy was a monotherapy - a single drug. By 1996 researchers found a way to
measure the viral load and actually see the effectiveness of the drugs, and they discovered the high mutation rate, and they could find it deep in
tissues thru biopsy. Until then they could only specualte it was a retrovirus. Once this was discovered, they tried the new 'cocktail' therapy to make
it harder for the virus to mutate around three different drugs, but they were still given at high dosages. By 2001 they gave up on eradication, and
were testing lower dosages - this is when I got into the clinical trials.
Others can speculate about the drugs thru what they read on websites and see in the newspapers. I lived it, and I still live and I work for a living
like anyone else. Just like Magic, and I have no goverment secret 'cure'. I started the trials with a 5-year limit. Extended to 10 years when the
group made it thru 5 years, and the test combo became the standard for patients on their first-line regimen. Now after 10 years, it has been extended
as a followup trial indefinitely - because all of the patients are still alive and healthy.
I will note this too. I was seeing a therapist who specialized in HIV sufferers. From 1989 thru 1997 she had 350 patients. There were only 42
remaining by 1997, but of those 42, only two more died because they refused to take the drugs (most likely because they saw too many friends die from
AZT monotherapy and were scared of the treatment).
I can only note my experience - progressively sicker for 10 years, then dramatic loss of weight, overtaken by opportunistic infections....started the
drugs and now I have high T-cell counts and no detectable virus.
You can debunk some of my assertions, but you cannot debunk my life. And my life debunks a lot of assertions I have seen here.
edit on
19-5-2011 by lakesidepark because: I am a myth.....