HIV/AIDS and beyond.(The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory)(Book review)

The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, by Henry H. Bauer; McFarland & Company, 2007, US$35.

THIS BOOK'S TITLE arouses suspicions: is the author really questioning the connection between Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)? A quick look at the back cover confirms this and tempts the rational reader to look no further and to consign the author to the dubious company of UFO nuts, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book is a measured, heavily referenced work bristling with tables, maps, graphs and correlations derived from data emanating from impeccable and publicly available sources, although no one had apparently bothered to take a good look at them before.

Furthermore, Bauer is not a fringe-dweller and has strong scientific credentials: a first-class honours degree in Physical Chemistry from the University of Sydney (where I first met him as a fellow undergraduate), a PhD, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech. Mainly after his formal retirement, he became involved in broader issues sometimes subsumed under the title of "Science Studies", an area in which he has also acquired an international reputation, but he had spent most of his academic life hewing away at his part (electrochemistry) of the science coal face. A typical life-journey of a successful and well-regarded science academic.

He is also the first to admit that he has no qualifications in or extensive knowledge of virology, or medicine in general, but points out that his thesis, unlike those of other "HIV sceptics" most famously Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, does not depend on technical arguments.

Bauer's thesis is that AIDS does not follow from infection by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus as evidenced by the "positive HIV test" and that HIV is not really a sexually transmitted disease, which is roughly the accepted medical view. He has examined the results of an enormous number of tests carried out on various groups of Americans ranging from blood donors to pregnant women, from prison inmates to volunteers for armed services, from household surveys to psychiatric patients and many more. We are talking about hundreds of research reports and literally millions of tests and of the correlations of the frequencies of HIV-positive results with time, age, gender, geographical distribution, ethnicity and the incidence of AIDS.

These data, carefully tabulated, graphed, mapped and critically ...