Document:Roanoke Times on Bauer

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The Roanoke Times
28 February 2006

BLACKSBURG — Henry Bauer seems to enjoy tweaking accepted wisdoms, including the one which says that HIV causes AIDS.

"The orthodox rule is wrong and the paradigm is ready to be toppled," Bauer said he concluded after "about a year of data-gathering and rumination."

Bauer, dean emeritus of arts and sciences and professor emeritus of chemistry and science studies at Virginia Tech, revisited the campus Friday for a seminar on why he believes human immunodeficiency virus is not the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

The standard view is that it takes about a decade for HIV infection to cause AIDS, that HIV first appeared in this country in the 1970s prior to the AIDS outbreaks of the 1980s, and that HIV is transmitted through sexual intercourse and blood transfusions.

But HIV distribution doesn't match that of AIDS, Bauer said. He cited statistics showing HIV tests varying in regular ways with age, sex, race, location and other factors, showing it to be something characteristic of people or places rather than contagious. AIDS does not show this sort of regularity, he said.

Black Americans in every tested group are HIV-positive about five times more often than white Americans, a ratio that has not changed in 20 years, he said. But the relative proportion of black and white AIDS victims has changed by a factor of three in that time.

It is no surprise that representatives of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta disagree.

"The scientific evidence is overwhelming and compelling that HIV is the cause of AIDS," Jennifer Ruth, media officer with the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention, said Monday. "Infection with HIV has been the sole common factor shared by AIDS cases throughout the world among heterosexual men and women, transfusion recipients, people with hemophilia, sex partners of those infected, children born to infected women, and occupationally exposed health care workers."

Ruth pointed to a CDC Web site citing its own statistics on the matter. The CDC says the distribution of AIDS cases does mirror the prevalence of HIV in particular populations.

The CDC argues that it is not surprising that a majority of AIDS cases in the United States were among men, because HIV first appeared mostly among homosexual men and injection-drug users, most of whom were men, based on 1999 census statistics.

This is changing as more women become infected through the exchange of HIV-contaminated needles or sex with HIV-infected males. In Africa, the CDC says, HIV was first recognized in sexually active heterosexuals, and AIDS cases in Africa have occurred at least as frequently in women as in men.

Daniel Breslau, an associate professor in Virginia Tech's Department of Science and Technology in Society, was among those in the seminar audience of about 50 who questioned Bauer's conclusions. He told Bauer that literally hundreds of studies support the HIV-AIDS connection, the documentation being many times stronger than the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Afterward, Breslau said he felt it was irresponsible and bordering on unethical for Bauer to publish his findings in what look like scientific papers on the Internet and elsewhere, without adequate peer review. People looking for a justification for risky behavior might take the claims as a license to engage in unprotected sexual activities, for example, he said.

But Bauer had every right to try to make his case at the seminar, Breslau said. In fact, an academic forum was the best place to do that very thing.

"I think he's asking the questions that need to be asked," said Joseph Pitt, head of Tech's philosophy department. "Challenges to orthodoxy are always good," he said, "if they're not done by offering one orthodoxy in exchange for another."

Bauer cheerfully admits to having no credentials in molecular biology, virology, immunology or epidemiology, but said he can still see that existing data shows HIV does not cause AIDS. He said no expert knowledge in those fields is needed to come to what he called a "heretical" conclusion.

© 2006 by Paul Dellinger
Originally published in The Roanoke Times