by Michael Ellner

Since September, 2006, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) made has a policy recommendation for routine HIV-testing, rather than allowing an informed and considered choice.

Link to CDC policy

This more difficult-to-avoid policy had been largely disregarded. Now, however, in The Bronx (a section in the northern portion of New York City) a campaign has begun to get around the consent procedures required by law.

Reports on The Bronx appear here.

And the California legislature has passed a requirement for health insurance companies to pay for HIV testing.

Reports on California appear here.

If we act quickly, we can expose the fallacy that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and major news outlets are trying to put over on the medical profession and the public at large. What they are trying to accomplish is nothing less than re-hypnotizing people into continuing to believe that everybody is at risk for AIDS. Yes, renewing the AIDS “group trance”.

Over the last several months, the CDC and major news outlets have been intentionally misrepresenting the need for expanded HIV-testing. Now is the time to speak out and challenge their big push for making HIV-testing routine.

Actively challenging the call for routine HIV testing is a powerful way to break the HIV/AIDS “spell” and help people recognize the AIDS-trance and escape from the AIDS Zone.

As you explore this site, you'll learn just how deadly this kind of mass self-hypnosis can be. The consequences will most certainly be deadly for the victims of the false positive results. These unfortunates will live with intense chronic fear and be pre-conditioned to get sick and die. If that doesn't kill them, the "life-saving" drugs will.

If that's not bad enough, how about this: making HIV-testing routine will reinforce the misconception that every one is at risk for AIDS, when the truth of the matter is that every one is really only at risk for a false positive result!

Routine "HIV"-testing, aimed at people who are not at risk for developing AIDS, is a serious threat to their health, well-being, and freedom! Unchallenged, it is predictable that medical doctors will mindlessly, frighten, mistreat, and ultimately kill the 9 out of 10 patients who will be unlucky enough to get a false positive result, due to expanded testing. The mind-blowing fact is that even if one is at risk, testing HIV-positive is NOT proof of infection, according to a review that was published in Bio/Technology in 1993.

Now is the time for HIV/AIDS dissidents to raise their voices and urge doctors, the public, and thinking people of conscience to refuse and resist the CDC's call for expanded testing.

As soon as we discredit "HIV"-testing, the CDC's spell will be broken and people will begin to see this murderous fraud for what it is.

Not a good sign.

More "HIV"-testing = More murders that will be blamed on AIDS!  

“HIV”-tests are  weapons of mass destruction! There are 70 well-documented reasons for “false positive” test results. That in and of itself begs the question: how does one even demonstrate a true positive result? THERE IS NO SUCH THING! If anyone is looking to make sense of all this, consider this: the "HIV" tests’ manufacturers themselves explicitly state that the tests are not proof of infection. And even if these antibody tests were accurate – which they’re not -testing positive on an ANTIBODY test is/was never proof of an active infection.  

If this new "HIV"-snow ball picks up momentum there will be no stopping it -- Every one will be at risk for a false positive!  You can be sure that wide spread testing will cause serious Negative Outcomes. The fear, isolation and pressure to take "life-extending medications" that automatically follows testing "positive" puts every one who takes the test at risk for MEDICAL MURDER!!!

 We must organize, unite and re-birth a "Refuse and Resist HIV-testing movement", Now! 

"HIV"- Every One Is At Risk For A False Positive Result!

Link to California press release

Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published in The New York Times

June 26, 2008

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.
Outside the Neighborhood and Family Health Center on East 149th Street in the South Bronx, Melissa Sierra, 20, expressed concern on Wednesday that the focus on the Bronx would reinforce “a lot of stereotypes” about the borough. “It might keep people away,” she said.

Dr. Frieden said the health department had chosen the borough because it had good relationships with clinics and hospitals there. “I think we are thinking of it, and the Bronx will think of it, as the Bronx being first to know, a community taking the lead in responding,” he said.

Robert E. Bank, chief operating officer of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Earl Brown, the deputy borough president in the Bronx, both said on Wednesday that they hoped the program would be extended citywide.

“Brooklyn is a horribly devastated borough,” Mr. Bank said. “Manhattan is a highly impacted borough, Queens is a highly impacted borough.”

Indeed, the rate of AIDS cases is highest in Manhattan, at 82 per 100,000 people, compared with 75 in the Bronx, 46 in Brooklyn, 26 in Queens and 16 on Staten Island, according to state health statistics compiled last year. But the rate of deaths from AIDS is highest in the Bronx, at 37 per 100,000 residents, compared with 21 for Manhattan, 19 for Brooklyn, 8 for Staten Island and 6 for Queens.

City officials said that Bronx residents are already more likely to be tested than adults in other boroughs (they estimate that 28 percent of Manhattanites, 24 percent of adults in Queens, 29 percent in Brooklyn and 17 percent on Staten Island have been tested in the last year).

The campaign to make testing routine, as Dr. Frieden put it, comes after years of lobbying by him and others to overhaul strict state regulations, which have changed little since the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when H.I.V. testing was perceived more as a public-health tracking system than as a diagnostic tool. The regulations require patients to give written permission for testing after being counseled on the process, which many doctors found onerous and time-consuming.

Dr. Frieden said New York’s consent law is among the nation’s most rigid. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends routine H.I.V. testing with doctors simply informing patients that the test will be given unless they decline.

San Francisco County Hospital, Dr. Frieden said, saw an increase of 17 percent in testing and 36 percent in positive results within three months of switching from written to oral consent in 2006.

Dr. Futterman, who is also a professor of clinical pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said she hoped that changing the mentality surrounding H.I.V. testing to make it a routine part of a patient’s blood work — along with, say, cholesterol tests — would galvanize state legislators to ease its consent rules.

“Everything in AIDS has changed except the old testing paradigm,” Dr. Futterman said. “Old school was that you had to tell them everything that could happen. That starts to seem cruel. If you go for cancer diagnosis, they don’t make the doctor say what you’re going to do if your mammogram is positive.”

The written consent requirement, she said, has been a barrier in emergency rooms, where doctors often feel it interferes with more immediate needs.

Under the new initiative, hospital administrators in the Bronx have agreed to test in emergency rooms, while still following state consent law. Dr. Futterman said she had carefully constructed a script for doctors that follows state law but squeezes what is typically a 20-minute counseling and consent process into five minutes. A doctor with lots of experience could deliver the script in three minutes, she said, and her own record is one minute.

Using that streamlined process, Dr. Futterman said, she had increased the proportion of her patients being tested to 20 or 25 percent, from 10 percent. Dr. Frieden said that city clinics for sexually transmitted diseases had testing rates as high as 60 percent, and the city jail at Rikers Island tested nearly 30 percent.

Mr. Bank said Gay Men’s Health Crisis opposes eliminating written consent, but would relax the process so that patients are given a form with two boxes, one saying they want to be tested, the other saying they do not.

In an effort to make H.I.V. testing less intimidating, the city will issue public service announcements and information on the 311 hot line. It is also posting tear-off sheets with addresses of testing centers in places like check-cashing stores, where residents can discreetly slip them into pockets.

“It’s not about one group doing it, it’s about everybody doing it,” said Dr. Sweeney of the health department. Community organizations, universities, churches and politicians, she said, “are going to have all their constituents that come to them for other services, they’re going to use it as an opportunity to say, ‘Get your H.I.V. test.’ ”

(Dmitry Kiper contributed reporting.)

Looking back on the AIDS crisis, 25 years on

"It seemed as if AIDS was reaching into all the places where beauty was reverenced and plucking out the most gifted."

Sunday, June 4, 2006, The letters page from the Chronicle:

Editor -- I was on the front line in the emergency department as the AIDS crisis unfolded in the 1980s. I know we were all wondering what it was and why it was happening. The unknown challenged us to give great treatment to every person who arrived, yet not expose ourselves to whatever it was.

The Centers for Disease Control mandated that all health-care workers start wearing latex gloves all the time any patient contact was done. If we didn't follow the mandate, we could be verbally counseled, written up, monetarily fined, or worse, fired for not following the new guidelines. We had no choice but to do what we were told. I did it so I could continue to give care to those who needed it.

My very last day at work, before I moved up north, I had an airplane pilot, who survived the crash of his small plane, as a critical patient. Then a very sick, end-stage AIDS patient, who needed immediate attention, arrived. I took him as my patient and let someone else treat the pilot. I was glad I spent my time with him, as he died the next day.

My compassion from the '80s was soon replaced with anger in the mid- '90s as I acquired a life-altering allergy to natural rubber latex proteins from wearing the mandated toxic gloves. The CDC knew there would be a certain percentage of health-care workers who would get this allergy, 15 percent by now. They didn't tell any of us about the potential hazard, just threatened us if we didn't wear the gloves.

So my life has been impacted forever by the AIDS crisis on a level no one really knows or cares about. I have no regrets for the patients I cared for, just anger that they kept a secret from the nurses on the front line.

We are the silent casualties of the AIDS war and have been forgotten. No one will ever tally up our losses and publish them.

PEGGY ROURKE-NICHOLS, R.N.
Arnold (Calaveras County)

Editor -- Twenty-five years ago, I had not yet heard of AIDS. Fifteen years ago, I watched one of my dearest friends, a gifted choreographer and ballet director, die of this terrible disease; no one could do anything to help him except to turn up the morphine and speed him on his way.

Later that year, I lost a former drama student, who was just hitting his stride in the entertainment world. A well-loved young man, who worked across the hall from my ballet director friend and me, and used to maintain a little garden in front of our funky old Lincoln Arts Building in west side Santa Rosa, followed his long-time partner into the grim world of AIDS fatalities. No one kept up the garden after Marc died.

In the early 1990s, our family shared in the mourning as members of the Oregon Shakespeare Company were lost to AIDS. It seemed as if AIDS was reaching into all the places where beauty was reverenced and plucking out the most gifted.

Nowadays, thanks to some "miracle'' drugs, HIV is no longer an automatic death sentence, at least here in the United States, but there seems to be no stopping it in Africa. I wonder if it can be stopped. Certainly it would help if some religious leaders would combine compassion with common sense, promote condom use and stop preaching hellfire and damnation. Also, the younger generation in our own country needs to be better-educated or we're going to see a new, perhaps more dangerous, wave of the disease.

MEG ROSENFELD
San Francisco

Editor -- Has my view of AIDS changed in the past 25 years? You bet it has. I was diagnosed HIV-positive back in the summer of 1987. When I heard the news, I was devastated. I was in a relationship and feared I had infected my partner with a terrible disease. I had planned to commit suicide if she turned up positive and was sure she would after four years of unprotected sex. To my amazement, she was negative and that issue was resolved, but I was to face more challenges.

I was told I had basically five years, at the most, to live, and to get my affairs in order and prepare for a slow, horrible death. I was immediately put on drugs to "slow the progression" to AIDS. After a few years of taking the drugs and waiting to die, I came across the views of some world-class "dissident" scientists (Nobel laureates among them) who challenge the official version of AIDS being caused by a retrovirus called HIV.

I went to my doctor and talked to him about the group of scientists and asked if I should go off my meds, because they were making me sick.

He told me they were crazy and if I went off my meds I'd be dead in a year. Well, I went off the meds and here I am, 14 years later, the picture of health. I make it through flu season without so much as a sniffle. I'm not encouraging people to go off their meds, however, just because it worked for me.

What I am saying is there needs to be a rethinking of what exactly causes this disease because there are too many inconsistencies in the orthodox theory. Science should be an open forum rather than simple dogma passed out to the masses just because one side has all the PR and funding.

I've come to realize that AIDS is not actually a disease, but rather a category or umbrella, if you will, under which every disease throughout the world that existed long before the AIDS era can be placed, if merely in the presence of a positive antibody test for HIV.

Example: TB without a positive HIV test is just simply TB. But accompanied by a positive antibody test it's called AIDS.

And the tests are confusing. There's no gold standard for them. Example: One can test positive in the United States and negative in Australia because each country has its own criteria for what "HIV positive" is. We all wait and pray for the end of this terrible syndrome, but I've come to believe it will come not in a laboratory, but in a courtroom instead.

MARK PORTIER
San Francisco