rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (12/14/84)
I've heard that French researchers think they've figured out the mechanism for AIDS & why only some people exposed to the pathogen (whatever it is; NO ONE yet knows for sure) develop full-blown AIDS. They hypothesize that AIDS is transmitted by receiving T-cells themselves from an infected person. This results in the mild AIDS-Related Complex (ARC) and asymptomatic forms (ie, "car- riers"). Full-blown AIDS occurs by receiving T-cells into which the pathogen has injected genetic material. This hypo- thesis is really the first anyone's advanced which feasibly explains the very puzzling selectivity of AIDS. Has anyone else heard anything about this? The US medical establishment as usual seems hopelessly out of it. Gallo's HTLV-III find seems to be declining in signifigance as each month passes. The French see a lot of heterosexual cases traceable to Central Africa. The current NYNative has a long article on the intensive African research that's just beginning, performed mainly by French researchers, but with a half-dozen Americans participating. The author believes that the next 6 months of reports of African research results will dispel once and for all any perceptions of AIDS as a "gay disease". The current Native has other AIDS articles that show how complicated the AIDS research picture has grown. One physician in a Florida town with a large Haitian population reports a high incidence of HTLV III and a growing number of AIDS cases. He believes that AIDS is in fact KS, a relatively new or rare form, not the sluggish skin cancer, but one which grows in lymph nodes & never appears externally. His reasoning is that every AIDS patient doctors have thought to test for the internal form of KS has displayed it, even patients who had the "traditional" external form of KS as well. The HTLV-III blood test now seems virtually worthless. The Native reports that a large group of people who scored positive on it showed negative results when another more reliable & much more expensive test for HTLV-III was used. Furthermore, due to the lack of a guarantee of confidentiality given to the 200,000 gay men who in good faith participated in HTLV-III testing a few months ago, large numbers are justifiably refusing to be retested & thus seriously jeopardize the study's value. Maybe now the federal medical bureaucracies will begin to take their hippocratic oaths & professional ethics seriously (maybe this will even inspire the ACLU or someone else to take on the barbaric & grossly unconstitutional statutes which pass for public health law in an epidemic, which few Americans know anything about). (So, as many physicians (including Curran of the CDC) advise, DON'T TAKE THE HTLV-III TEST!!!!!!! Its signifigance is UNKNOWN, it may well be WORTHLESS, & leaves one open to serious discrimination & abuse! If you think you have symptoms and aren't well, seek a competent & trustworthy physician (not necessarily easy to do), PREFERABLY a gay doctor, who's AWARE of gay lifestyles & homopho- bia; even then, don't automatically have the test: find out first what if anything it can offer you and how it relates to your com- plaints. Marcus Welby is an utter myth!) Cheers, Ron Rizzo