Re: What hope can be offered to AIDS patients?

[Guest guest]

All my friends who managed to stay alive until the introduction

>of protease inhibitors are still alive today, regardless of their previous

>or even current lifestyles, diets, etc.

Christie, pardon my ignorance, but I'm trying to figure out how a protease

*inhibitor* would help with AIDs or HIV? People take strong proteases to

*kill* viruses (I have one called " ViraStop " for instance which seems to

help a lot of autistic kids), so I'm just wondering how protease inhibitors

fit into AIDS therapy? I assume it probably acts on certain proteases that

somehow accelerate the disease or something?

Suze Fisher

Lapdog Design, Inc.

Web Design & Development

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3shjg

Weston A. Price Foundation Chapter Leader, Mid Coast Maine

http://www.westonaprice.org

----------------------------

“The diet-heart idea (the idea that saturated fats and cholesterol cause

heart disease) is the greatest scientific deception of our times.” --

Mann, MD, former Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Vanderbilt

University, Tennessee; heart disease researcher.

The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics

<http://www.thincs.org>

----------------------------

[Guest guest]

--- In , Idol <paul_idol@y...>

wrote:

>

> Chi-

>

> >Of course, this is another example in nature

> >of the terrain being everything and the seed being nothing.

>

> I know you've warned against hybrid crops, so unless you've changed

> your mind, you're contradicting yourself by saying the seed -- and

> therefore its genes -- are meaningless.

Hi :

I am not contradicting myself, I am actually being very consistent.

I will explain. When I talk about seed germination in nature that is

totally different than our planting crops. When we plant a crop and

fail to take into account the terrain, the seeds may fail to

germinate, the crop may be stunted and not produce any yield that is

worth harvesting or the yield may also drop as a result of attacks by

insects or disease.

In nature, when soil fertility declines, the " weed " seeds germinating

change from the more proteinaceous, less carbohydrate plants to the

less proteinaceous, more carbohydrate plants. Albrecht

explains it by saying that as the first European explorers crossed the

country the woody weeds followed them. Of course the transition in the

weed population resulted from the decline in soil fertilty caused by

those farmers.

So when the soil fertility declines and planting seeds from open-

pollinated plants fail to produce the desired crop, instead of

restoring the soil fertility (the terrain), the farmer switches to a

less proteinaceous, higher carbohydrate hybrid seed which therefore has

a better chance to produce a crop because that seed better suits the

terrain.

In either case when we plant a seed, hybrid or otherwise, it is a

plant that would not be growing there if we did not plant it. You can

tell when the terrain better suits your open-pollinated crops because,

left on their own they will produce plants the next year from their

own seeds. If they are not out-competed by the weeds that grow there

naturally then you know you have done a good job in your gardening to

alter the terrain to suit that crop that you want to grow.

I actually have pictures of a 2 acre corn field where all treatments

were the same on the whole field except for an application of

paramagnetic rock that was applied on one half of the field. Not only

were there dramatic differences in the corn on each side of the field

but in the drive row down the side there was an amazing difference in

the " weed " seeds that germinated. The farmer has never needed to

plant " weed " seeds on his farm, he claims that he always has plenty.

So, in this case, an apparently insignificant change in the energy

terrain had a dramatic difference not only on the corn plants, but

also on the weed germination in the drive row.

Chi

[Guest guest]

>> Christie, pardon my ignorance, but I'm trying to figure out how a

protease

*inhibitor* would help with AIDs or HIV <<

Protease is one of the enzymes used by HIV to reproduce, just as other

enzymes are used by other pathogens. For instance, you can prevent the

symptoms of canine parvovirus by giving a neuraminidase inhibitor. Same

concept.

Christie

Caber Feidh ish Deerhounds

Raising Our Dogs Holistically Since 1986

http://www.caberfeidh.com/

http://doggedblog.com/

[Guest guest]

> > > > [mailto: ] On Behalf Of

> dkemnitz2000

> > > > Hey could I ask what you mean here by evolve? I know I

> > > > shouldn't ask cause I never understand your explanations But

> > > > I wanted to hear

> > > > your definition of evolve. Dennis

> > >

Is this info below your definition of evolve? Where did you

get all that info? What does it mean?? I don't get it? " Microbes

must act at a certain critical mass to exert some effects, a sharp

environmental change COULD cause a mass reproportionment of the

genes...... " HOW you going to change my genes by sending me to the

north pole or the moon? It isn't that simple is it? MAYBE all the

microbes need is information (from the designer?) " to exert some

effects " . Dennis

And in addition to what said, the

> proportion

> > of individuals with any given preexisting gene in a population

will

> > change over time in reaction to the environment. Although in

this

> > particular case, unlike the one offers above, the

property

> > conferred by a gene whose proportion in the population is

changing

> > might not be something fundamentally new, since microbes must

act

> at a

> > certain critical mass to exert some effects, a sharp

environmental

> > change could cause a mass reproportionment of the genes in the

> > population, such that at the level of the population, the

property

> is

> > new, simply because a critical mass of the microbes now possess

it,

> > their competitors in the population having been weeded out.

> >

> > Chris

> > --

> > Dioxins in Animal Foods:

> > A Case For Vegetarianism?

> > Find Out the Truth:

> > http://www.westonaprice.org/envtoxins/dioxins.html

> >

>

[Guest guest]

{]Doesn't history provide a pretty good approximation of such

an experiment, for example, the introduction of smallpox to

indigenous American populations?

[Chris] Well this is what I first had in mind but I thought I would

refresh my thoughts before bringing it up. But yes, I would agree.

What I was saying, of course, was that in the instances in which

primitives were immune to any given microbe (like tb, for example) in

NAPD, there was no evidence that this was a newly encountered microbe

like experienced by native populations all over the Americas.

Actually, there is a Mexican epidemiologist, Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, who

has been doing research about the smallpox epidemics for something

like 12 years and there is considerable credible evidence that it

was not smallpox at all, but a native hemorrhagic fever similar to

ebola...

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-06/features/megadeath-in-mexico/

K

Megadeath in Mexico

Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the

worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could

still be out there

By Bruce Stutz

DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 02 | February 2006 | Anthropology

When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand

men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered

about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of

devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared

with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was

extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto

refers to it as the time of " megadeath. " The toll forever altered

the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind

of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes

as well as their swords.

The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they

came to the New World was well established by the 16th century.

Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common

European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years

of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the

people of the West Indies and had begun to spread to the South

American mainland.

In 1565 a Spanish royal judge who had investigated his country's

colony in Mexico wrote:

It is certain that from the day that D. Hernando Cortés, the Marquis

del Valle, entered this land, in the seven years, more or less, that

he conquered and governed it, the natives suffered many deaths, and

many terrible dealings, robberies and oppressions were inflicted on

them, taking advantage of their persons and their lands, without

order, weight nor measure; . . . the people diminished in great

number, as much due to excessive taxes and mistreatment, as to

illness and smallpox, such that now a very great and notable

fraction of the people are gone. . . .

There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even

the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that

devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed.

Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen

the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had

been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn't add up. His

studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar

with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it

zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of

zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted

about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks.

But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576,

seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those

outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. " For them, cocolitzli was

something completely different and far more virulent, " Acuña-Soto

says. " Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed

readily from one region to the next and killed quickly. "

After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the

Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had

nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do

with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that

is worth knowing about in 2006.

A portly man with a full, close-cut dark beard, Acuna-Soto

is a devoted scholar of all things Mexican. As we maneuver our way

through the crowded streets jammed with taco stands around the

General Hospital of Mexico, which serves Mexico City's poor and

where Acuña-Soto often visits when not teaching at the National

Autonomous University of Mexico, he effuses about everything from

pre-Hispanic Mexican history to the quality of street-vendor tacos

( " stay away from the salsa; it's got nearly as much bacteria as

human feces " ). When he was younger and thinner, Acuña-Soto says—

before he went to Harvard University to study epidemiology and

molecular biology—he interned as a physician in rural Chiapas,

traveling by burro to patients in remote mountain villages.

On our drive south to his home in Cuernavaca, he recalls how his

life changed after his return to Mexico in 1984. " When I came back

here from Harvard, there was a big devaluation of the peso. My grant

proposals had been accepted, but there was no money. "

What might a restless epidemiologist do? With an eye toward writing

an encyclopedia of Mexican diseases, Acuña-Soto began combing Mexico

City's archives, researching the most famous epidemics, those that

came after the Spanish conquistadores arrived.

The Aztec kingdom then was the last in a line of Mesoamerican states

that emerged, flourished, and then vanished over the course of 2,500

years. Borrowing from the preceding Olmec, Teotihuacán, Mayan, and

Toltec traditions, the Aztecs studied science and cosmology,

agriculture, engineering, art, even archaeology. They had no written

language but, using colorful and evocative pictographs, kept

voluminous records in books of animal skin, agave fiber, or bark

paper. Most of these, evoking ritual blood sacrifices, horrified the

Spanish, who set about destroying the kingdom's library.

Fortunately for Acuña-Soto, some Spanish priests worked with the

Aztecs to recapture their history, language, and culture before it

was lost. In volumes of often colorful codices, key cultural and

natural events in their lives were recalled and redrawn. Droughts,

snows, and floods, good and bad harvests, all were re-created on the

pages of these codices along with the changing geopolitical

landscape.

The census data from the time of the Spanish invasion were so good

that Acuña-Soto found he could track the movement of epidemics from

village to village across the country. Friar de Torquemada, a

Franciscan historian writing in 1577, described the wake of

cocolitzli in typical detail:

It was a thing of great bewilderment to see the people die. Many

were dead and others almost dead, and nobody had the health or

strength to help the diseased or bury the dead. In the cities and

large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the

priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them

into the ditches. . . . It lasted for one and a half years, and with

great excess in the number of deaths. After the murderous epidemic,

the Viceroy Enriquez wanted to know the number of missing

people in New Spain. After searching in towns and neighborhoods it

was found that the number of deaths was more than two millions.

Medical historians insisted that the cause of all this affliction

could only have been a European disease. But Acuña-Soto says, " The

more I read of the cocolitzli, the more I realized that the

descriptions of the disease and its spread did not fit any

recognizable epidemiological paradigms. "

It made no sense, of course, that the Aztecs had invented a new name

for smallpox. And Acuña-Soto noticed that previous researchers had

to pick and choose among the disease reports to make them fit a

diagnosis of smallpox or typhus. He also could not understand why

Old World diseases would cause massive deaths 20 years and then 55

years after the arrival of the Spanish. " By this time, " Acuña-Soto

says, " those who survived the earlier epidemics would have had

immunities or would have passed them on. "

" Historians assumed it must have been smallpox; it must have been

typhus, " Acuña-Soto recalls. " But historians are not

epidemiologists. "

To prove anything beyond a hunch, Acuna-Soto knew he would need good

forensic science. He considers himself fortunate to have found the

work of Francisco .

, personal physician to Philip II of Spain, was named Proto-

Médico de su magestad de todas las Indias in 1576. He was, in

effect, the surgeon general of New Spain.

" Philip sent him to Mexico to see what he could learn of native

medicines, " says Acuña-Soto. " learned five Indian

languages and wrote 50 volumes based on his own observations and

interviews with hundreds of Indians. He performed autopsies on many

of the victims of the 1576 epidemic. But the books arrived back in

Spain just after Philip II's death. Philip III considered the

project too expensive to publish, and the manuscript disappeared for

400 years. Around 1950 it resurfaced in the Hacienda Library in

Madrid. "

Six years later, Mexican physician German Somolinos d'Ardois

published an account of that manuscript. Although 's

descriptions of what he saw were rendered in an unsophisticated

Latin, Somolinos d'Ardois was able to conclude that

considered the 1576 epidemic different from those that had come

earlier.

Acuña-Soto sent the text of the original Latin manuscript to a

friend, a physician working with the Centers for Disease Control in

Washington, D.C., who was also a Greek and Latin scholar. The new

translation he got back described cocolitzli in terms that did not

match any Old World disease:

The fevers were contagious, burning, and continuous, all of them

pestilential, in most part lethal. The tongue was dry and black.

Enormous thirst. Urine of the colors of sea-green, vegetal green,

and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale.

Pulse was frequent, fast, small, and weak—sometimes even null. The

eyes and the whole body were yellow. This stage was followed by

delirium and seizures. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared

behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal

pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery. The blood that flowed

when cutting a vein had a green color or was very pale, dry, and

without serosity. . . . Blood flowed from the ears and in many cases

blood truly gushed from the nose. . . . This epidemic attacked

mainly young people and seldom the elder ones.

" This was certainly not smallpox, " Acuña-Soto says. " If they

described something real, then it appeared to be a hemorrhagic

fever. "

Hemorrhagic fevers are viral diseases with names that evoke

justifiable dread—Ebola, Marburg, Lassa. They strike with sudden

intensity, rarely respond to treatment, kill at high rates, then

vanish as mysteriously as they came. They are called hemorrhagic

because victims bleed, hemorrhaging in their capillaries, beneath

the skin, often from the mouth, nose, and ears. The bleeding doesn't

kill, but the breakdown of the nervous system does. At first there

is fever, fatigue, and dizziness, but within a few days the person

falls into delirium and finally a coma.

All types of hemorrhagic viruses share traits. They are extremely

simple, composed only of RNA enveloped in a fatty membrane, and they

all must develop first in an animal host—often rodents or bats—and

are spread by insects such as ticks or mosquitoes. A bite, direct

exposure to rodent feces or urine, or indirect exposure through

windblown particles can pass the virus to humans.

If cocolitzli had been caused by a hemorrhagic virus, Acuña-Soto

realized, the Spanish could not have brought it with them. Such

diseases do not readily pass from one person to another, so the

virus must have been native.

This raised two questions. First, were people prepared to absolve

the Spanish of responsibility for one of the great evils of the

colonial era? The destruction of ancient Mexico's culture by the

Spanish invaders is an integral part of every Mexican's

understanding of the country's history. The miseries of the plague

years are taken as object lessons in the evils of colonialism. " My

grandmother wrote histories, and the terrible things that the

Spanish did were always a part of them, " says Acuña-Soto. The second

question was rooted in science: If the Spanish didn't bring about

the cocolitzli, what did?

The only way to find out was to look at each wave of the epidemic

and compare it with the others, looking at what happened before,

during, and after. As Acuña-Soto painstakingly plotted out these

details, he found that, as they say on the TV show CSI: Crime Scene

Investigation, the killer had a pattern. The common factor was rain.

For the Aztecs, as for any agricultural society, rainfall was so

important that it was well recorded in the codices. The Valley of

Mexico in which the Aztecs lived was not easy land to farm. At 7,000

feet, and surrounded by volcanic peaks more than twice that high,

the land undulates with often steep hills. The rains, only 30 to 40

inches a year, come between May and October. There are frequent late

and early frosts that can kill maize crops. Roughly half a million

people lived in the densely populated basin at the heart of the

Aztec kingdom, and they depended on the harvest. It is no surprise

that the codices all bear witness through evocative pictographs of

heavy rains, frosts, or—more telling—catastrophic droughts.

Acuña-Soto saw that each of the cocolitzli epidemics appeared to be

preceded by several years of drought. He also found that the

epidemics didn't happen during the drought. They appeared only in

the wet periods that followed. That was the crucial clue he had

missed: It was raining when people got sick.

The clue offered Acuña-Soto a hypothesis—but only if he was correct

that outbreaks of disease always followed periods of drought. The

codices wouldn't stand up as scientific evidence. For instance, two

periods might be called droughts, but their severity might be very

different. If he claimed that a native hemorrhagic virus, not an

outbreak of Old World smallpox, had killed 10 million Aztecs, he

needed better data, some way to measure the exact intensity and

extent of the droughts and rains.

That is how he met up with the tree-ring people.

As Acuna-Soto and I drive beyond the sprawl of Mexico City,

it is easy to envision the hardscrabble life most Aztecs lived. Lava

domes rise from broad, flat plains. Generations of eruptions have

deposited thick layers of ash on which farmers raise scrappy crops

of maize or other grains. The soil, if you can call powdery gray

pumice " soil, " is pathetic. In the dry fall air, with most of the

harvest in, a few footsteps can kick up a dust cloud. In winter,

storms of blowing pumice take visibility down to zero. Here, Acuña-

Soto says, people still use the word cocolitzli to mean a terrible

disease.

Evidence from tree rings collected near modern-day Mexico City

confirms Rodolfo Acuña-Soto's hypothesis: The years of the greatest

Aztec plagues were preceded by years of exceptional drought. In a

tree-ring record like the one below, taken from a 450-year-old

fir, light bands show spring growth. The darker bands in

between represent the tree's summer and fall growth. In an arid

climate such as that in the Mexico basin, the growth of a tree is

most affected by the amount of spring rainfall. As this set of tree

rings shows, rainfall in the Aztec kingdom (the light bands)

declined following 1571. After four years of intensifying drought,

the rains returned in 1576. Records from hundreds of other trees in

the region confirm this pattern. According to Acuña-Soto's theory,

rodents infected with a viral disease the Aztecs called cocolitzli

remained holed up wherever they could find water during drought

years. When the weather turned wet again, the rodents spread out to

take advantage of the increased water and food, spreading cocolitzli

to humans and unleashing a deadly plague.

In the dusty village of Guadalupe we meet the rest of Acuña-

Soto's research group: four Mexican scientists—a forest ecologist, a

geomorphologist, and two dendrochronologists—and two American

dendrochronologists. Dendrochronology is the study of tree rings to

date changes in climate. The American researchers, Stahle and

Therrell, began working together when Therrell was Stahle's

graduate assistant at the University of Arkansas. Therrell, young

and lanky, teaches at the University of Virginia. Stahle is the

reverse image of Acuña-Soto—thin, with a light complexion and silky

white hair. His narrow, silvery beard gives him the appearance of a

Dutch church deacon.

Acuña-Soto had hoped the tree-ring record would corroborate the

codices' accounts of years of drought and rain with hard data. The

logic is simple. Thick tree rings mean wet years, good for growth;

thin rings mean lean, dry years. It didn't take much persuading to

interest Stahle, who quickly enlisted Therrell and Malcolm

Cleaveland, a University of Arkansas geosciences professor who had

originally introduced Stahle and Acuña-Soto.

The three of them hooked up with Mexican researchers José Villanueva

Díaz and n Cerano Paredes, who in turn introduced the group to

Eladio Cornejo Oviedo, a forest ecologist at the Narro

Autonomous University of Agriculture. As this diverse team headed

into the field, the project became both a challenge in climate

reconstruction and an opportunity to search for old trees in places

that had never been cut for timber or cleared for agriculture.

Fortunately, this area of Mexico is home to secreted stands of

fir trees.

" fir, " says Stahle, " is the best tree in the world for

taking cores and looking at the rings. Until recently, we didn't

even know they still existed in central Mexico. "

The wooded ravine through which we hike the next day is one of only

nine remaining stands of fir in the region. Altogether the

stands cover just about 125 acres. We carry packs, chain saws, and

tree-coring devices, looking for old firs likely to have

extensive ring records. Dead trees can be even more revealing than

living ones, as they may be far older. Matching up the first rings

of a dead tree with those of a living specimen can yield one long,

extended record. Stahle is excited by trees lying half buried

beneath the dry creek bed. Soon the ravine echoes with the sound of

the chain saws cutting disks a few inches thick from logs two feet

in diameter.

Acuña-Soto does his share of the heavy lifting and looks at the cut

disks and drilled cores as possible witnesses to events 450 years

ago. The trees contain a remarkably detailed record. Thin stripes of

light wood denote periods of intense spring growth and how heavy the

rain was that spring. They are separated by darker stripes, wood

that formed during the summer and fall. Comparing the widths of

rings can reveal relative annual growing conditions over hundreds of

years.

The evidence from the firs shows that during the 16th

century central Mexico not only lacked rain but also suffered the

most severe and sustained drought in 500 years, one that encompassed

nearly the entire continent. Moreover—here was Acuña-Soto's smoking

gun—the tree-ring records show wet interludes setting in around the

years 1545 and 1576, the years of the cocolitzli.

With the climate data in place, Acuña-Soto could piece together a

convincing explanation of those epidemic years. Cocolitzli had been

caused by a hemorrhagic fever virus that had lain dormant in its

animal hosts, most likely rodents. Severe drought would have

contained the population of rodents, forcing them to hole up

wherever they could find water. Initially, only a small percentage

may have been infected, but when forced into close quarters the

virus was transmitted during bloody fights. Infected mother rodents

then passed the virus to their young during pregnancy. When the

rains returned, the rodents bred quickly and spread the virus—

through their urine and feces—as they came into contact with humans

in fields and homes. Once infected, humans transmitted the virus to

one another through contact with blood, sweat, and saliva.

Acuña-Soto's trips into the woods with Stahle and the Mexican

researchers continue to fill in epidemiological details. " I have

evidence from 24 epidemics from 1545 to 1813, " he says. " I am

comparing the tree-ring data with each of them. " In each case, he

sees the same pattern. He also thinks he may have solved one of the

other great mysteries of cocolitzli—namely, why it hit the Aztecs

hard but left the Spanish largely unaffected.

Hemorrhagic viruses affect human populations that are already

stressed, Acuña-Soto says. " The natives were poor and probably near

starvation and living in unsanitary conditions where the rats would

congregate. They also worked in the fields, where they'd be exposed

to the rat droppings. The Spanish made up the upper classes. "

Cortés and his soldiers defeated, enslaved, and murdered the Aztecs,

but now it seems that cocolitzli, a disease brought about by a

native virus, is what really finished them off. Today the Aztec

kingdom exists only in museums and ruins, but the virus could still

be out there. As Mexico enters into yet another period of severe

drought, could the killer reemerge?

" I don't know, " Acuña-Soto says, then hesitates. " I don't think so.

Although we have much poverty now, we don't have the kind of poverty

and poor nutrition that the Indians suffered then. But I keep in

close touch with my colleagues at the public hospital, just in

case. "

[Guest guest]

Get and read this and see if things brighten up.

http://www.campusi.com/bookFind/asp/bookFindPriceLst.asp?

prodId=0962052728

--- In , Idol <paul_idol@y...>

wrote:

That said, I'll be grateful for anything you can point me to.

>

>

>

> -

>

[Guest guest]

On Jan 18, 2006, at 11:02 AM, Christie wrote:

>> In most circles and most recent times, though, " total health

>> fanatics " did horrendous damage to their health.

>

> Yes, that's very true - I mean, *I* was a vegetarian then. <G>

>

> However, the usual culprits identified by the Duesberg folks as

> " causing "

> AIDS are rampant recreational drug use, promiscuity/anal sex, and

> being a

> scene queen ... partying all night. Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

>

> While there's no doubt that some of these guys were vegetarians or ate

> macrobiotic diets and other things I've come to see as being harmful

> nutritionally, in other respects they were very in tune with their

> bodies

> and had very healthy lives in many ways - certainly several of them had

> learned quite a bit about stress management. And being a vegetarian

> certainly doesn't cause AIDS or it would be widespread in lesbians. <G>

>

> My point is not that they were " healthy " per se, but that a wide

> diversity

> of lifestyles and approaches to HIV/AIDS resulted in a wide diversity

> of

> outcomes - that some people who really didn't have healthy lives by

> anyone's

> definition did beat HIV once they got on appropriate, late-generation

> antivirals ... whoever is still talking about AZT monotherapy in 2006

> is

> just NOT paying attention .... while other people who had relatively

> healthy

> lives even if I wouldn't consider their diets optimal, didn't, AND VICE

> VERSA. I didn't mean to imply that the " healthy " guys died and the

> " unhealthy " ones lived. Not at all. It actually seemed to make no

> difference. All my friends who managed to stay alive until the

> introduction

> of protease inhibitors are still alive today, regardless of their

> previous

> or even current lifestyles, diets, etc. Those who eat well (and I

> include

> some WAP folks there, although none as far as I know on this list) and

> get

> exercise and take decent care of themselves are doing fabulously well

> and

> you'd never know they had any kind of disease or condition - and they

> take

> antiviral drugs.

>

Are you willing to share what drugs they took?

Parashis

artpages@...

zine:

artpagesonline.com

portfolio:

http://www.artpagesonline.com/EPportfolio/000portfolio.html

[Guest guest]

>> Are you willing to share what drugs they took? <<

At one time or another, I've known someone who takes or has taken just about

all of them in combination with others. And because HIV treatment is

combination therapy, it's even more individualized.

Christie

Caber Feidh ish Deerhounds

Raising Our Dogs Holistically Since 1986

http://www.caberfeidh.com/

http://doggedblog.com/

[Guest guest]

>

> I read your post and find your analysis of weeds, plants, and soil,

> totally sensible and consistent. However, your analogy fails in

> certain observable ways. First to note what should

> be evident, it is fraught with the danger of serious

> error to generalize even between mamallian species about

> the effect even of a single chemical, and the

> magnitude of that danger runs much deeper when comparing,

> for example, humans to birds. Yet you are freely

> generalizing very broad concepts between not even

> plants and humans at this point, but even soil and humans.

Hi Chris:

Does the above mean you disagree with Voisin when he says at the

coclusion of chapter 5, " This helps me understand the ancient

proverb, 'The same soil makes both corn and men', which, stated in

more scientific terms would read, 'Animals and men are the

biochemical photograph of the soil.' " ?

> While there may be valualbe points to be made by using

> such analogies, the fact is that we know a lot about

> human immunology, and it doesn't work the same way as

> plant immunology, and it certainly doesn't work the same

> way as soil " immunology, " if you want to call it that.

> One clear difference between human immunology and soil

> " immunity " to " weeds " is that both past exposure and

> genetics can contribute to the immunity to specific diseases.

> As long as the seeds are somewhat available, you may go back

> and forth over time to the same cycles of plants as the

> conditions of a soil change, whereas outbreaks of certain

> types of diseases in human history often cause a massive

> dieoff and then disappear, and the next big strike is with a

> *different* organism, because those who are left have acquired

> immunity.

To discuss soil fertility with me you should really learn something

about it. I have no idea what your term, soil " immunology " , means. I

don't know what soil immunity to weeds is either. I have never run

into that in my studies of soil fertility.

When you say that plants go back and forth over time to the same

cycles of plants as the conditions of a soil change, it indicates to

me that you don't understand the manner in which soil conditions

change. For the most part, soil is not under construction but rather

under gradual destruction, even without our interference. This is a

one-way street where the nutritional value of the plants growing

there is in decline until the plants are so weak that they are

unable to reproduce. Then new plants that can survive in that

terrain, because they place less demand on the soil fertility and

produce less nutrition, take over.

The same would be true for the animals or people that lived there

and depended on the plants for nutrition. As the plants declined in

nutritional value the population density of animals in the area

would be expected to decline and the health of individual animal

would also decline.

NAPD has an example of decline over a thousand years or so of a

human population. I don't expect what these natives were doing would

have undergone any substantial change during this time but the only

reasonable explanation to me would be soil fertility was declining

so the food that once kept these people healthy no longer did and

the change was gradual over obviously many generations.

> Look at the black death for example. Yes, there were

> agricultural misfortunes around the time it came about,

> but after it killed a third of Europe, it didn't come

> back when soils the world over went through

> much trouble, lowering the immunity of the people.

I don't know much about the black death, but I sure wouldn't want to

have taken the treatment. Soils the world over have never gone

through much trouble, whatever that means. Although somewhat

limited, there are areas in the world where soil construction takes

place.

> Or look at how the Europeans brought all kinds of diseases that

> ravaged natives of the Americas all over. Even if some of the

> native groups had declining skull sizes since Columbian times,

> and even if some of them or even all of them didn't have

> perfect diets, it is difficult to conceive that the Europeans

> diets could possibly have been better, since the Europeans

> quite clearly wrecked the soil while the natives tended to

> maintain it, or at least many of them did, in many areas where

> they hunted and left the woods rather than cutting them down.

> Yet 65% or more of the natives were killed off extremely quickly

> by infectious diseases brought by the Europeans, while the

> Europeans had immunity. Because the Europeans had specific

> immunity to those diseases.

What is a perfect diet?

In fact, according to Albrecht, because for so long European

soils have been limited with respect to population, they have done a

much better job of maintaining their soil fertility. With the large

land area in North America and the relatively small population there

was never a need to maintain soil fertility. The natives or early

explorers could exhaust the soil fertility at one place and simply

move to another. They couldn't do that in Europe, so they were

forced to do a better job maintaining soil fertility.

> This doesn't happen with soil and weeds.

> Soil does not have B cells that provide " memory " to the

> immune system that, having experienced a

> " weed " before can provide specific immunity to that weed.

> In some ways there are analogous elements, but they

> are very different processes in the majority of ways

> and stretching the analogy can easily lead to unjustified

> conflations.

Maybe someone can explain what this means as I have no idea.

Chi

[Guest guest]

> On your past suggestion, I have purchased and read the

> Acres USA primer, which you suggested as introductory

> to Albrecht. I have not read The Albrecht Papers yet, although

> I would like to in the future, and, of course, you bear

> sole responsibility for my knowledge of their

> existence and wish to read them.

> Likewise, I would suggest that you familiarize yourself

> with some basic textbook biology, physiology, and biochemistry

> so you can get a basic understanding of what has occured in

> those fields in the last six or seven decades since your

> favorite authors have written their great works when discussing

> immunology or vitamin D or identifications of vitamins with me.

> Following up on research extraneous to NAPD helps understand

> NAPD a little bit more in some respects than reading NAPD over

> and over again -- for example to know that Yoder's test did

> not test for antirachitic properties and was neither specific to

> vitamin D nor activator X is useful knowledge when considering

> Price's findings and *hypothesis* about activator X --

> and I suspect the same is true with the Albrecht Papers.

Hi Chris:

At the end of Chapter 28 Voisin states:

" All these observations serve to illustrate how very different

results can be obtained from trials based on a foodstuff so

variable, although identical in appearance. It cannot be stated too

often, nor sufficiently stressed, that the progress of biological

and medical sciences must necessarily be slow so long as no

consideration is given, either in experimentation or in dietetics,

to the pedological and agronomic origin of the foodstuffs employed. "

I know I have taken this quote out of context but hopefully it will

have some meaning for you. The foodstuff in this case was milk. You

would be able to put the quote in context if you are able to read

the chapter, it is just over two pages long.

I would certainly be interested in any studies you can refer me to

that take the pedological and agronomic origin of the foodstuffs

employed into account.

As perhaps you realize by now, even the content of Weston Price's

activator X in a foodstuff would not be sufficient for me to judge

it's nutritional value. That, imo, can only be determined by the

outcome on health in feeding experiments. As I would suggest to the

consumer purchaser of raw milk, don't judge the nutritional value of

raw milk by nutrient analysis, judge it by it pedological and

agronomic origin but confirm that by actually drinking it.

I have no problem with leaving all the nutrient studies to you while

hoping you are taking into account these agricultural variables that

can alter the outcome of experiments. I will continue to concentrate

on finding out how to create soil fertility to grow food in that

would equal or surpass the nutritional quality of food used by

Weston Price in his experiments, primarily with dental caries.

In what you do, you are among many. In what I do and the approach I

take there are few. Good luck to you.

> Admittedly, your knowledge of soil science surpasses

> mine. However, it is my understanding that over very

> large amounts of time the natural process is for ecosystems

> to cycle, and for plants to cycle from grasses, to flowers,

> to trees, and eventually to repeat the cycle.

From my studies this is not the case. If you have a scientific study

that supports your view, I would be glad to read it.

> How is this " destruction " then, if the new plants thrive?

It is destruction caused by climatic forces. When there are no

longer parent rocks to renew the soil to make up for the slow

erosion of minerals to the sea, the soil fertility declines.

What Albrecht means is that declining soil fertility is less able to

create the proteins necessary for life. As a consequence, plants

needing higher levels of soil fertility no longer thrive and

eventually can no longer survive and they go extinct in that area.

New plants can move in and thrive because they are more carbonaceous

but less proteinaceous in their construction, so they can thrive in

a area where the more proteinaceous plants could no longer survive.

Any animal life in the are dependent of the more proteinaceous

vegetaion would either become more sparce or disappear from the area

as a consequence of the declining soil fertility. Even what we don't

usually see, the microbe population in the soil, would change with

this alteration in the soil fertility of the terrain.

> But in any case, in a grander picture, different

> plants have different roots.

Again not true according to Albrecht. The same plant has different

roots because plant root lenght is not genetically determined, it is

determined by the soil fertility the plant is planted in.

> > NAPD has an example of decline over a thousand years or so of a

> > human population. I don't expect what these natives were doing

> > would have undergone any substantial change during this

> > time but the only reasonable explanation to me would be

> > soil fertility was declining so the food that once kept

> > these people healthy no longer did and the change was

> > gradual over obviously many generations.

>

> I've read NAPD many fewer times than you apparently (actually only

> once, except certain parts) and it's been a couple years, so I'd

> appreciate it if you would speak clearly of the populations you're

> talking about in it.

As I have mentioned in other posts, my son is reading my copy of

NAPD atm. When I get it back I will reference this in its exact

location in the book.

> But from memory I suspect you're referring to the skull

> thicknesses that Price measured of Native Americans, finding

> a significant thinning of the post-Columbian era relative to the

> pre-Columbian era. If so, then I think it is probably a matter of

> both. Many natives changed their diet as corn and some other crops

> came from Mexico, actually around the same time I think.

Nope, it wasn't them I was referring to.

> I was referring to those of European descent who settled

> here, and to their notorious destruction of, for example,

> the New England soil. From what I have read, the natives

> in the area hunted and let the forrests stand. Although that

> type of set up might still drain the soil over time, it

> hardly compares to letting the soil just whether away in tilled

> fields. One of the groups Price studied (I forget which one)

> used forest for the very purpose of preserving their soil

> for longer periods.

The soil fertility in New England was in decline long before the

Europeans arrived. The natives were not responsible for the decline,

the weather was. Albrecht calls trees " nature's last stand against

the erosion of soil fertility " , so remember when you see trees you

know the soil fertility is low. The type of forest further indicates

the soil fertility.

> In any case, my point was that the differential immunity to various

> diseases of the natives and the European settlers can better be

> explained by differences in historical populational exposure to the

> specific microbes than it can by a superiority of the nutrition of

> European settlers.

Fine, I disagree. The natives wouldn't have had the problems of the

European settlers until they ate the inferior quality of nutrition

of the European food. Gosh, I thought that was the point Price over

emphasized in his book.

Chi

Chi

[Guest guest]

Christie-

> However, the usual culprits identified by the Duesberg folks as

> " causing "

> AIDS are rampant recreational drug use, promiscuity/anal sex, and

> being a

> scene queen ... partying all night. Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

How is anal sex supposed to cause AIDS if the idea is that AIDS isn't

caused by an infectious agent which can be transmitted via anal sex?

> And being a vegetarian

> certainly doesn't cause AIDS or it would be widespread in lesbians. <G>

That's certainly true! <g>

> Those who eat well (and I

> include

> some WAP folks there, although none as far as I know on this list) and

> get

> exercise and take decent care of themselves are doing fabulously well

> and

> you'd never know they had any kind of disease or condition - and they

> take

> antiviral drugs.

This is certainly interesting.

I'm not at all up on antivirals, but my understanding had been that

they were even conceded by their promoters to be pretty nasty. Not so?

-

[Guest guest]

Quoting Idol <paul_idol@...>:

> Christie-

> > However, the usual culprits identified by the Duesberg folks as

> > " causing "

> > AIDS are rampant recreational drug use, promiscuity/anal sex, and

> > being a

> > scene queen ... partying all night. Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

>

> How is anal sex supposed to cause AIDS if the idea is that AIDS isn't

> caused by an infectious agent which can be transmitted via anal sex?

I'm not sure whether Duesberg says anything of the sort, but I've heard that

one of the early hypotheses to explain AIDS (before HIV was discovered) was

that exposure to sperm in the large intestine provoked an immune reaction,

and that frequent exposure to the sperm of many different people would

eventually exhaust the immune system. Or something like that.

--

Berg

bberg@...

[Guest guest]

> How is anal sex supposed to cause AIDS if the idea is that AIDS isn't

> caused by an infectious agent which can be transmitted via anal sex?

Yes, it does boggle the mind, but one of the earliest expressions of this

theory, which appeared in a mainstream magazine although at the moment I

don't remember which one, actually proposed that the introduction of semen

into the rectum IN AND OF ITSELF caused immune system destruction. (It is

true that local immunity is suppressed in the vagina when semen is

introduced, because otherwise the sperm would be killed ... but women don't

develop general immune suppression from vaginal intercourse even so. Fetuses

cause immune suppression too, for that matter. Heterosexuality is very

risky.

This was long, long before the internet but let me see if I can find the

article or a citation to it.... a very fast google search just now didn't

turn it up and I don't have time to search more carefully.

> I'm not at all up on antivirals, but my understanding had been that

> they were even conceded by their promoters to be pretty nasty. Not so?

My personal observation is that, with a really skilled prescriber, good

prescription drug coverage, and some trial and error, most people do end up

finding a combination of drugs that is effective and tolerated. This was

much less true when there were fewer drugs. I have had friends die from the

side effects of the medications themselves, but most of them died in the

earliest days when AZT was the only medication available. AZT was also given

at much, much higher dosages when it was being used by itself, with

correspondingly more frequent and severe side effects. AZT is a hideous drug

but it's little used today, and NEVER by itself.

I am not suggesting HIV medications are a walk in the park, nor that I'd be

happy to take them. I wouldn't. Nor am I suggesting that the side effects

can't be severe, because they surely can be. I'm just saying there are a lot

of drugs out there now, a lot more clinical experience using them, and

things are not as dire as they once were. And no matter how much I'd be

naturally inclined to believe the worst of these meds, I can't deny what

I've seen with my own eyes, which is people who were clinging to life by

their fingernails start on anti-HIV drug combos, get up from their beds,

gain weight, have their T cell counts return to normal, have their

opportunistic infections go away, have their viral loads become

undetectable, go back to work, fall in love, go out dancing, go on vacation.

They went from pale and sunken cheeked and emaciated, riddled with thrush

and fungus and even serious diseases such as pneumonia, to hale, hearty, and

riding their bikes on the weekend.

I've also seen people develop pancreatitis, heart disease, liver disease (to

be fair, that one was believed to be an idiosyncratic reaction to an

antibiotic and not from his HIV meds, but who knows?), and diabetes from

their HIV medications. But in all those cases, there was poor quality

medical care to blame - inadequate monitoring for side effects by shitty

HMOs or VA hospitals. If the doctors had been watching for those things as

they are supposed to do, they'd have been caught early and a different drug

combo tried.

Part of the problem with allopathy in general is not so much its theory but

its practice. But that's another topic for another day.

Christie

Caber Feidh ish Deerhounds

Raising Our Dogs Holistically Since 1986

http://www.caberfeidh.com/

http://doggedblog.com/

[Guest guest]

-

How droll.

>but I've heard that

>one of the early hypotheses to explain AIDS (before HIV was discovered) was

>that exposure to sperm in the large intestine provoked an immune reaction,

>and that frequent exposure to the sperm of many different people would

>eventually exhaust the immune system. Or something like that.

-