Curing AIDS: Clinical Trials and Future Hopes
Since super-star athlete Magic Johnson’s wife Cookie announced he was cured from AIDS in 1997, there’s been some confusion about a cure for the disease. There is no cure for AIDS, however there are treatments.
Christina MeGill from the Cornell Clinical Trials Unit and Mark Milano from the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America discuss HIV/AIDS treatments with health reporter John Mikytuck, and update us on the research community’s efforts to develop new classes of medications to fight the world-wide devastation caused by the disease.
We linked the AIDS Clinical Trail video to our website so that all our clients, friends, and Board members can access the very fine information provided.
I would like to know how long the video will be at your site, so that I can inform our visitors?
Joe Pais
Deputy Director
AIDS Help, Inc.
Key West, FL
hi joe,
this video will be available permanently. feel free to link to it.
take care,
peter
This is a great educational resource for the public, and also for people working in the field. The video covers the basics, and is up to date with research focuses as well. Thanks for putting this together, John!
Stephen Fallon, PhD
President
Skills4, Inc.
Very interesting. Well John, I just don’t know. HIV researcher Amy Justice of the Pittsburg Medical Center did a study that she released at the Barcelona AIDS conference in 2002. It showed that the leading cause of death in American HIV positives is LIVER FAILURE directly related to who was taking the HIV HAART drugs. Liver failure, by the way, is caused by toxic poisoning and IS NOT caused by a virus!
The guy in the video talks about the many thousands of “LONG TERM NONPROGRESSORS”, which all have in common the same three things. One: the nondrug taking nonprogressors are NOT DRUG ADDICTS, and two: THEY DO NOT TAKE THE TOXIC AIDS DRUGS!!! And Three: They do not buy into the voodoo stress and disease causing belief that they will die of HIV/AIDS. The stress alone of believing this will kill the patient!
When my lover came down HIV positive, he was referred by the local county office of AIDS to go to the local AIDS drug trial group. He went there and even though he was (and still is) completely healthy, the doctors at the trial group encouraged him to quickly get into a couple of drug trials. One of the trials was for a drug already on the market, and the other study they recommended to him was for a drug in development. He was also told that after the trial was over, the trial group would assist him in getting his drug prescriptions paid for by the government.
I was very concerned about all this, because like I said, he was not sick at all and felt just fine. This sounded VERY suspicious to me. So I went to talk to the director for a private one on one to ask some questions.
I asked the director point blank 3 questions.
I asked:
1) Does the drug trials group get paid by the drug companies per patient, per drug, and per trial.
The directors answer was YES. They get paid by pharma companies per patient, per drug, per trial. (some people are on more than one drug and in more than one trial so the group gets paid for each even though)
2) I asked HOW MUCH IS THE AVERAGE PAYMENT per patient, per drug, per trial?
The directors answer was a bit crazy: She answered “From $3000 to $10,000 and UP”!!!
3) I asked DOES THE TRIAL GROUP INFORM THE PATIENTS AND VOLUNTEERS OF THE OBVIOUS CONFLICT OF INTEREST WITH THE DRUG COMPANIES????
The director told me “NO, they do NOT inform the patient volunteers of the drug company payments”!!!
So what is going on here with the trials? It serves THREE PURPOSES.
One: to SELL DRUGS! They get the patients on these very dangerous drugs and get the government to pay for the prescriptions which are for many thousands of dollars a year to the drug companies benefit.
Two: To get enough bodies on the drug company run, designed, and operated trials to get the drugs approved for sale.
Three: It is all about the money. Money for the trials group and money for the drug companies. All at the expense of the health of the naive volunteers who believe they are helping science progress and saving lives by volunteering for these trials.
Is this video a great public resource? or is it Pharma Propaganda???????? You decide!
Do we really need more Theories for HIV? AIDS Science will continue Contradicting itself all one has to do is read one study then read another study it’s that simple.
I agree with John Moore of AIDSTRUTH.org that Pubmed is open to the public but alot of people are just down right lazy!
This Video is another advertisement for the HIV Industry/AIDS Inc.
Reply to Michael in response above.
That study showed that of the treated patients living with HIV who do die, liver failure is the most common cause of death. This is not the same as saying that if you don’t go on treatment, HIV won’t do its own harm.
The medicines used to fight HIV are certainly “offenders,” i.e causing liver toxicities, affecting cholesterol, impacting bone density, etc. But the important point is that those who never take meds typically have a much shorter life expectancy.
In other words, HIV meds may overtax the liver, but this unfortunate outcome comes with the benefit of a much longer life expectancy overall gained by taking meds when it’s time, 15+ years longer according to many sources. See
Walensky, R. “2 Million Years of Life Saved: the Survival Benefit of AIDS Therapy in the United States.” 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Abstract 143LB, Boston, MA, February 25, 2005.
VD Lima, RS Hogg, PR Harrigan, et al. “Continued improvement in survival among HIV-infected individuals with newer forms of highly active antiretroviral therapy.” AIDS 21(6): 685-692. March 30, 2007.
Lohse N, et al. “Survival of Persons with and without HIV Infection in Denmark, 1995–2005.” Annals of Internal Medicine 16 January 2007, 146;2: 87-95.