Читать книгу What Doctors Don’t Tell You - Lynne McTaggart, Lynne McTaggart - Страница 22

The most shameful instance of an unreliable lab test used for diagnostic purposes is the AIDS test. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test is most frequently used to test your HIV status, and is usually considered proof-positive that you are infected with HIV. A test called Western Blot is often used as a confirmation. For the ELISA test, a sample of the patient’s blood is added to a mixture of proteins. It is assumed that if HIV antibodies are present in the blood, they will react to the HIV proteins in the test.

The proof that HIV causes AIDS hinges entirely on the idea that detection of an antibody response to the virus is proof of its actual presence. Doctors assume that if your body has made antibodies specific to HIV, it must mean that a protein of the virus – and so the virus itself – is present. In other words, the so-called AIDS tests cannot test for the presence of HIV, just the presence of antibodies to it – the usual sign that the body has fought off infection and won.

With the Western Blot, these HIV proteins are isolated in bands; when mixed with a blood sample, each protein band will show up if it has bound to an antibody.

Besides being unable actually to detect HIV, these tests are notoriously unreliable; in Russia, in 1990, out of 20,000 positive ELISA tests, only 112 could be confirmed using the Western Blot, according to Australian biophysicist Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, who has studied both tests in depth.¹¹⁸ The French government considers these tests so unreliable that it withdrew nine of the 30 HIV tests that were once available.

The other problem is that neither test is specific to HIV; both react to many other proteins caused by other diseases. For example, the protein p24, generally accepted to be proof of the existence of HIV, is found in all retroviruses that live in the body and do no harm. This means that p24 is not unique to HIV, as Dr Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus, has stated repeatedly. Hepatitis B and C, malaria, papillomavirus warts, glandular fever, tuberculosis, syphilis and leprosy are just a few of the conditions that are capable of producing biological false-positives in ELISA tests.¹¹⁹

In one study, antibodies to p24 were detected in 13 per cent of patients with generalized papilloma virus warts, 24 per cent of patients with skin cancer and 41 per cent of patients with multiple sclerosis.¹²⁰ In one study, half the patients with a positive p24 test later tested negatively.¹²¹

Western Blot, supposed to be the more accurate of the two, has proven no better than ELISA. Dr Max Essex of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, a highly respected AIDS expert, found that the Western Blot gave a positive result to some 85 per cent of African patients later found to be HIV-negative. Eventually, he and his researchers discovered that proteins from the leprosy germ – which infects millions of Africans – can show up as a false-positive on both ELISA and Western Blot, as can malaria.¹²² In one study of Venezuelan malaria patients, the rate of false-positives with Western Blot was 25–41 per cent.¹²³

This poor track record is disturbing when you consider that the main AIDS ‘risk’ groups – gay men, drug-users and haemophiliacs – are exposed to many foreign substances such as semen, drugs, blood transfusions and blood components, hepatitis, Epstein Barr virus and many other factors or diseases known to cause false-positives in HIV tests. Other populations exposed to a greater than normal amount of disease – such as Africans and drug-users – also make many more antibodies than the rest of us and therefore are likely to end up with a false reading.

Blood transfusions can also produce a false-positive HIV test result. In one study, the amount of HIV antibody detected in ELISA tests was greatest immediately after blood transfusion, and thereafter decreased.¹²⁴ One volunteer was given six injections of donated HIV-negative blood at four-day intervals. After the first injection his HIV test was negative, but the HIV-positive antibody response increased with each subsequent transfusion.¹²⁵

Of course, the greatest problem with an HIV test is that a positive test labels you HIV positive for life. Being HIV positive can bar you from insurance, employment, marriage or even entry into another country. The HIV test can also launch many healthy patients on the inexorable road to ‘just-in-case’ AIDS treatment with drugs whose considerable, even life-threatening side-effects bear uncanny resemblance to the list of symptoms doctors describe in HIV infection or full-blown AIDS.