The Aweful Deception: What They Haven't Told You About AIDS

Virtually every medical and governmental agency I dealt with had a hidden agenda, mainly political, that kept them from handling the AIDS epidemic according to well-established public health guidelines. For a long time I was confused, unable to understand why no one seemed interested in hearing the truth, much less publicizing it and acting on it.

Everyone was so busy behaving in the "politically correct" mode, a mode often necessary to keep one's job, that creative and imaginative political rationalizations were constructed to explain abominable committee decisions -- decisions that often led to loss of life.

In your book you talk about "AIDSpeak." What is that?

AIDSpeak, stripped down to its essentials, sells you that old line of the Depression era that warns "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself."

This naive attitude, at present provides the shadow troops for AIDS. It has attached itself to AIDS -- the ugliest disease that I have ever seen, and the first massively and systematically politicized disease that has been falsified, misrepresented, and then whitewashed to the public.

I speak specifically about that huge, unwieldy bureaucracy that deals with infectious diseases. In our present academic atmosphere, controlled by grants and, hence, by politics that often are special interest politics, it is all too advantageous for someone with a yen for recognition and advancement to publish a "scientific" article that toes the party line.

The present party line in hospitals is this: AIDS is being neatly kept in check with "universal precautions," namely gloves, gowns and goggles. I am here to say it is not. AIDS remains dangerously on the loose.

AIDSpeak translates into death.

When I accept a patient, both of my hands are bound. As a doctor entrusted with this patient's care, I am allowed to test without permission for any disease known to man -- except AIDS.

As a patient, you have the right to know about your surgeon's schooling, lawsuits, professional track record, specialization and, I suspect, credit rating as well -- practically everything except the fact that your surgeon may carry the virus that kills.

That's crazy. How did we become so nonchalant? The answer is simple. We aren't taught that vigilance is virtue. We're taught that nonchalance is chic.

We know that HIV infection in homosexual men may occur at least 35 months before any antibodies can be detected. We also know that surgical gloves don't detect holes smaller than 10 microns in diameter, allowing the AIDS virus to pass through. We also know that the AIDS virus can enter the body through normal skin contact. Why wasn't the public told these alarming facts?

The more I thought about this situation, the more I came to feel a real sense of betrayal from the medical establishment. I found all sorts of things that were not common knowledge but were well documented in the medical literature.

I found out, for example, that the virus is not "fragile" -- far from it.

It can survive on a dry surface for as long as seven days.

It survives freezing. It can transmit through saliva. It can transmit through oral sex.

It seems to have transmitted at least once through a bite that didn't break the skin.

It has been found and judged infective on needles in amounts so minute that they look like "clean" needles.

Some disinfectants formerly believed to denature the virus have proved not to be sufficiently strong.

You were viciously attacked by politicians, the press, the gay community in San Francisco, and even medical people, when you questioned the wisdom of blood banks in 1988 holding blood drives in high risk gay communities, such as the Castro district in San Francisco. How safe is the nation's blood supply?

Throughout the entire controversy, nobody ever talked with me. None of my medical colleagues publicly supported my stand. They treated me as though I had done the unspeakable, the equivalent of having taken out a membership in, say, the Ku Klux Klan, although later, privately, virtually all of them agreed with me.

There was something almost surreal about that summer, as though people had conspired to turn all rules of safety upside down, insisting they were right side up.

As one of the first physicians in the nation to voice suspicions publicly about contamination of our blood supply, I, too, became aware that there might be an operative factor that put public relations on a pedestal and human lives into the grave. It did not take me long to see that verified.

It's called the profit motive.

John Doe may not know, and if he were told, might not believe that this is so. The average American citizen, feeling chivalrous and selfless as he is having blood drawn from the vein in a blood bank drive replete with Red Cross, apple juice and doughnuts, believes that he is giving health and life to another human being. Against that noble impulse, it is anathema to think of blood banks as corrupt.

Yet many of the actions of he nation's blood banks have been no less than sinister. They have been callously reactionary, irresponsible, calculated, negligent and profit-driven and, hence, malevolent.

To call them less than that does injustice to the many lives already lost and many who still may be lost.

How can that be?

Protocol stands in the way. Special interest blackmail dictates policy. Public image is believed to have a higher value than public safety.

In late 1987, it came to light through investigative reporting that those who were operating the voluntary donor blood bank in San Francisco knew for two years that they had miscalculated the previous risk enormously.

The risk in one specific year prior to 1985 was not one in 100,000. Not one in 250,000. Not one in 1 million.

It was one in 100! Yet the blood banks told no one. That information was not revealed until two years later. As reported by the San Francisco Examiner medical writer Lisa Krieger, it was "fear of AIDS hysteria" that kept the blood risk an official secret.

The Centers for Disease Control estimate that as many as 29,000 Americans may have been infected with the AIDS virus by blood transfusions between 1978 and 1985. Blood banks were acting as if ignorance is bliss -- and maybe still are in many cases.

How could such a holocaust in our midst have happened, with none of us any the wiser?

How much is homosexuality involved in the AIDS epidemic? Why do so many homosexual men get the disease? Are they innocent victims who ought to be pitied? Or are they bringing this horrible disease upon themselves by their conduct?

Long before we knew of AIDS, a very well known San Francisco health official repeatedly warned the gay community of San Francisco that there would be very serious consequences to traumatic sex with countless numbers of partners. The oft-repeated argument that gays did not know about AIDS, and hence, fell innocent victims to AIDS, is simply not a fact.

They were told repeatedly, in many more ways than one. They were warned that if this behavior continued they could not remain healthy. Something disastrous would happen.

It has been my observation during 15 years as a doctor in one of the world's most-frequented trauma hospitals that much of gay sex is of the harmful, sadistic and/or masochistic variety. Gays hurt each other. They also hurt themselves.

One does not have to moralize about the rightness or wrongness of gay male sexual behavior. I don't believe that God singles out gay men for punishment. Nature imposes its own penalty. As a physician, I know very well that if we abuse our bodies we will get sick and possibly die.

There are very serious health consequences to abusive and self-abusive sexual behavior. Gay males as a rule have been abusive to themselves and to their partners to a degree that is incomprehensible within the heterosexual world. Gay bathhouses have become the well-known dens of death from which AIDS has sprung like a specter straight out of hell.

The gay community seems to admit to no limits. With the use of drugs, 24-hour non-stop sex, with sexual encounters in restrooms, bushes, parks, gymnasiums, bathhouses, and at gay parties, where drugs are used to heighten and intensify the sexual experience, with "speed" becoming the drug of choice, whether snorted, mixed with a drink, swallowed or inserted into the rectal area, a person could "go all night," and maintain a perpetual erection. Young men engaging all night in sex with large numbers of different persons, without the problem of orgasm which is inhibited by the drugs, the resultant "high" produced such an intense "rush" that a person was game for anything sexually the mind could imagine. Isn't this kind of behavior inherently dangerous? How did the AIDS epidemic get started?

It is quite possible, I think, that the AIDS virus was around for many years, but it may have been a harmless virus. I believe the first AIDS case has now been shown to have occurred as long ago as 1959. It did not attack the general population because it may not have been virulent enough.

But then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we saw the start of the Gay Revolution. That's when "love-ins" became the vogue; orgies might be a better word.

With it came practices in gay bathhouses with hundreds or even thousands of sexual partners per year engaged in all sorts of traumatic sex -- promiscuous, abusive, and violent sex, brutal, vicious and ramming sex that often involved tearing of the lining of the intestines and rectum so that there was direct contact with semen and blood between numerous partners in rapid succession.

Bathhouse is a misnomer. The only function of these establishments is to provide a place for non-stop anonymous sex of any type imaginable with as many partners as one wished.

Here was a fairly self-contained population who appeared to be quite well as far as their overall health was concerned, but because of their sexual practices, virtually all had hepatitis or had had hepatitis.

They virtually all had venereal diseases or had had venereal diseases and had thereby weakened certain mucous tissues.

Many gays had intestinal parasites because of their back-and-forth fecal contamination from fisting and anal sex.

A large number of them were either on recreational drugs or hard drugs which heightened their need for sex and more sex and did away with all inhibitions.

Many had sex with multiple partners through "glory holes" -- 3-5 inch holes cut in the wall for the purpose of repeated, anonymous sex where participants never saw each other.

What you are describing sounds like the debauchery of the ancient Roman Empire, with its orgies and bacchanal feasts and sexual excess. It sounds like something straight from the time of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah!

The virus was passed back and forth repeatedly among this very homogeneous population with certain medical characteristics and sex-specific tissue weaknesses. This gay bathhouse population comprised the walking wounded...So what does a struggling virus or bacteria do when it starts climbing up the evolutionary ladder?

It starts getting stronger. And stronger and stronger.

Weak particles die off. A virus such as HIV is particularly prone to rapid mutation, sometimes within the same body. That means that it can more easily infect progressively healthier people. These people then can infect still healthier people. That is one way a harmless virus can become a deadly virus. The rest may be called history.

Gay males have always been inordinately vulnerable to a host of infectious diseases, diseases often occurring simultaneously. Medically speaking, anal sex with multiple partners in rapid succession is not an innocuous practice. When Andy Rooney said that the homosexual lifestyle was unhealthy, he was medically correct. He was suspended from his job for telling the truth.

In medical circles, we speak of the "gay bowel syndrome" a descriptive term that refers to such unpretty things as intestinal pathogens and chronic infections. Almost all gay males have or have had hepatitis B. Many gay males have ulcers and oozing blisters in or around the intestinal tracts, including the mouth and rectum. More than half of all reported cases of syphilis in the United States occur in homosexual men.

Nature simply has not equipped the tissue of the rectum for heavy-duty assault. Intestinal tissues bruise and tear easily during violent homosexual intercourse. The bowel will react with spasms. A tearing of the lining can occur, as well as bleeding anal fissures, small cracks in the anus when it is torn.

Brutal anal sex, "fisting," or the use of mechanical sexual aids such as dildos or vibrators produce tears and lacerations of the rectum throughout which infected semen and pathogenic organisms can and will enter the bloodstream. Blood and fecal matter sometimes find their way into the abdominal cavity through injuries.

Nature said "exit," not "enter," yet the things that have entered the exit are items that we as doctors have had to remove from the rectums of gay men: light bulbs, vegetables such as zucchinis and cucumbers that have already started fermenting, Coke bottles, dildos, vibrators, shaving cream cans. I saw an X-ray once of a 3 inch by 12-inch plastic tool box before it had been removed from a homosexual's rectum -- the tools were still inside.

I know of one case where plaster of Paris was used. It made for anxious moments in the operating room. The hardened stuff had to be removed in chips.

Patients have come into our hospitals who have sustained enormous injuries from violent, sadistic sex. Not infrequently, large foreign objects have punctured the intestinal wall, causing dangerous seepage of fecal matter into the abdomen.

"Fisting" is a common practice in the gay community. It does just what it says: it's manual-anal intercourse. One man will push his hand, fist, and forearm up to his elbow into the rectum and lower colon of another man and sometimes grip and tear on the liver, spleen and intestinal wall...In some cases, well documented in hospital records, the damage to the rectal sphincter from fisting is so extensive that a colostomy must be performed. If fisting happens over an extended period of time, the rectal sphincter gets stretched. Not a few gay males have serious problems with rectal incontinence.

"Golden showers" are another well-known homosexual practice where some men will urinate on eager partners. Urination into the mouith and over the body of a participant, known inventively as "water sports," is a common homosexual practice.

Some homosexual males are known to have defecated on each other, a "sexual variation" known as "scatting." These practices are not part of an "acceptable alternate life-style" in a respectable medical book. Medically speaking, the homosexual lifestyle is a harmful lifestyle fueled by a sexual addiction that has no limits, knows no rules, and refuses to practice restraint.

It is estimated that today three out of four AIDS-stricken people on the American continent are male homosexuals. In New York and San Francisco, 70 percent of male homosexuals are estimated to be infected with the AIDS virus and are infectious to others. There is no avoiding the evidence; it is on the map and in the numbers. AIDS exploded in the bathhouses frequented by homosexuals.

It was passed back and forth by homosexuals in bushes, public restrooms, porno shops and adult bookstores. It is still spreading there by such unaltered practices. It spreads as if there were no tomorrow, as indeed, there may not be.

So homosexual practices are a root cause of the AIDS epidemic sweeping the United States and the modern world. But what about the heterosexual population? Does the homosexual lifestyle affect those who don't engage in such bizarre behavior?

I want to go on record saying strongly that I have now revised my tolerance scales. I do bring judgment to male homosexual behavior. I do so as a physician and I do so as a citizen. When certain sexual practices and preferences are killing not just the practitioners, but also scores of innocent people who have nothing to do with that lifestyle -- didn't choose it, don't endorse it but on the other hand, have never harmed it either -- is it not right to speak up loudly and be heard?

The gay male consumption in terms of random partners has been overwhelming. We are talking numbers. We are talking death. We are talking promiscuity on a scale that is hard to fathom, and that has to stop.

And finally, let's put to rest the argument that homosexuals can't change. That is an old, old argument -- and in the trash it goes. "No doubt," said A. A. Milne, "Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds it was human nature." Human nature, above all, consists in understanding and applying moral mandates. Maybe homosexuals can't change the object of their sexual attraction, but they don't have to act on their impulses, especially when it can kill themselves or others.

We must alter our language. This truth must be repeated, over and over again: Somebody's private mania is spreading massive public death.

AIDSpeak has conditioned us not to shout, "Fire!"

There is a roaring fire, but if we just keep from acknowledging fire, then maybe it will self-destruct. With credit to Saul Bellow, a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

I happen to believe that shouting "Fire!" is appropriate. Had we done that 12 years ago, we would not now have 83,000 dead and 1 to 3 million Americans infected.

How is the AIDS virus transmitted from person to person? Is sexual intercourse, sharing of drug needles, or blood transfusions, the only ways AIDS is passed along to others?

The general public stance is that this virus can't transmit via kissing, through sharing of utensils, by shaking hands or via aerosols. One risks professional lynching, practically, if one suggests mosquitoes, bedbugs, ticks or flies.

These claims of non-transmission are being made because there is no clear-cut "evidence" that HIV transmits that way. The truth is no one has done the proper studies. As things stand now, authorities claim they don't know of any AIDS in American children who live in households that have HIV or go to school with children who are HIV-infected, even though scientific evidence now tells us clearly that it may take ten years or longer to develop the symptoms of AIDS....We simply don't know whether or not this virus transmits through casual contact or other vectors, and if it transmits, to what degree.

We must start asking: When? How? Where? How often?

In fact, we have some evidence that it transmits not just in theory but in practice. The documented evidence, at present, is in only a few cases:

What we don't know, at present, is the degree to which it transmits. We haven't really looked. We haven't really asked.

There is an old saying: "Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you."

Wise words in light of the fact that the lethal virus has been not only detected in saliva, but has been transmitted through saliva. It may come as a shock to the romantically inclined, but a few people seem to have contracted AIDS through kissing or saliva-on-skin exposure.

It's not only a kiss that may infect. What if a spoon or a martini glass left on a counter carried the infective virus?

A 1985 report from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, revealed that concentrated AIDS virus in saliva remains alive and infective on a dry surface at room temperature for as long as 7 days.

A twenty-five year old Italian soccer player contracted the AIDS virus after an injury caused by a collision with another player during a soccer game. The infectious disease physician reported that the virus was apparently transmitted through severe cuts of the forehead sustained by both players. Two months after the accident the player was found to be HIV-positive. One year before, he had tested negative and had no other risk factors. The other man involved in the accident was a member of a soccer team composed of residents of a drug rehabilitation center and he had previously tested positive for HIV.

Research has shown that transmission does not require open wounds. HIV infection has occurred from infected blood coming in contact with intact mucous membranes and skin.

What does the future hold for the world, since the AIDS epidemic has been dealt with in such a pitiful, senseless, mindless manner? What with the official denial, cover-up, suppression of the truth, and government and health officials "toeing the party line," with the language of AIDSpeak, is there any chance the epidemic can be halted or stopped? What is the prognosis, Doctor?

Ten years ago there were only 200 patients diagnosed with AIDS.

Ten years ago? It seems a century ago!

Now there's a holocaust. Predictions are that by the year 2000, some 60 million people in the world will be infected with HIV, and AIDSpeak insists that the only way to stop this world-wide scourge is "education." That is like saying that chanting "abracadabra" will stop a raging firestorm.

For the sake of illustration, let us assume that fifty-five acres of brushland were burning. Instead of surrounding and isolating those fifty-five acres and letting the fire burn itself out, we would assign both firemen and victims in the path of the voracious fire to attend seminars about the meritorious use of water.

In a health care crisis that looks as though it has already sentenced one in every 100 Americans to almost certain death, you don't waste time on correlations. You don't waste time on aiding fire setters so they can set more fires.

In his May 23, 1990, AIDS Quarterly, Peter Jennings of ABC, called it, "the worst epidemic in history." Less than 10 years ago the infection rate was one in roughly 4 million. Now it is estimated to be one in 100. What will America look like ten years from now? Like Zaire?

One-third of Zaire's population is now believed to be infected with HIV. Only twenty-five years ago the disease in that part of the world was practically unknown.

That leaves us some twelve years.

From the best information available to us right now, we can predict that most people who are already infected will die within the next decade. Millions will die of AIDS in America alone...Estimates are that within three years, the number of Americans killed by AIDS will be five times the number of U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam. Where is the monument?

From what you are saying, it sounds like the government and all society is complicit in the AIDS cover-up. This seems so incredible. Can it be true?

AIDSpeak is winning, because we allow it. The truth is being suppressed throughout society; in the movie industry, in business, in the media, in universities, in medical societies, in medical schools, in hospitals, and at every level of government. Those who speak out not only are ostracized by their fellow workers, but from their superiors they receive threats of firing. For telling the truth about AIDS, some doctors have been threatened with loss of medical licensure, severe bodily harm, and even death. No wonder so few are willing to speak out!

"How can gays wield so much power?" everyone asks. Boasts a recent AIDS column in a San Francisco newspaper, gay activists are the ninth most powerful political action committee in the country. Twenty years ago only a thousand individuals in the U.S. were promoting gay rights. Now there are 7000 organizations fighting for gay rights.

Baring a more sinister motive, I believe that it is reasonable to assume that our leaders want to keep the population calm about the risks of HIV as a crisis management tactic. However, it is also a cover-up.

Long before AIDS started ravaging America, women knew that condoms weren't safe. The newest figures on pregnancy show that condoms are just about the most unreliable form of birth control. With the regular use of condoms, 14.2 percent of women will get pregnant, even though an ovum is receptive to sperm only three or four days in a month. AIDS can be transmitted any day of the month. Common sense will tell you that the rate of transmission for AIDS would be a multiple of the 14.2 percent rate of a potential pregnancy -- double, triple or quadruple that figure.

This is not safe sex!

What can society do to stop the AIDS epidemic? Is there no solution to this rampaging killer on the loose?

Every reasonable citizen understands that to control a contagious disease, certain rights will be infringed upon. Measures to control are enacted not to hurt the individual; they are instigated to protect society from harm. Such a common sense measure is enacted when your child is sent home from school with the measles and as a result misses a week of instruction.

We must learn to see AIDS as a contagious disease and not as a test of our "biases"...Fear of this disease is appropriate fear. To control this disease by proven methods is the task at hand for modern medicine. To pre-empt this virus from public health safeguards for socially faddish reasons is criminally wrong; it is wrong morally, legally, and medically.

This is the first disease of mankind ever where secrecy is sanctioned, aided and abetted by the government, the medical profession, politicians and the law. This is the first disease known in medicine in which a doctor does not have the right to know that the patient has the disease.

Why doesn't the United States government, and other nation's governments, tell the truth about AIDS to the people? How can we fight a disease which is kept carefully guarded, as if it were a top secret, and kept under wraps?

We have been lied to and lied to and lied to. We are being lied to now. The Big Lie, as far as I am concerned, is that American citizens currently have all the information necessary to protect themselves from AIDS, and if they do not, that's their tough luck.

The great dying has not yet begun.

The symptom-less infected who walk our streets today will be in our hospitals tomorrow. Maybe they will be in our streets. Maybe they will lie in your driveway.

Our health care system is simply not equipped to handle what will be the grim reality five or six years from now. We must plan for tomorrow by extrapolating from today -- or we can anticipate chaos.

As of right now, there are 500,000 AIDS-infective people in the New York City area alone. It is estimated that in less than half a decade, 50 percent of the hospital beds in New York City will be occupied by AIDS patients. Currently only 5 percent of the hospital beds in New York City are occupied by AIDS patients, and already there is an overload.

This virus has no mind. It has no human rights philosophy. It is a microbe, itself still on the edge of life. It struggles to "survive." It does so by transmitting and mutating.

As surely as May follows April and night follows day, if it transmits and mutates in ways some of us think it might but many do not acknowledge, the time will come when it will steal your loved one's breath, extinguish your graduate's smile, invade your grandchild's brain.

It is a virus. Plain and simple. If we can grasp that much, the battle is more than half-won. It wants to "live." It multiplies at a ferocious rate.

In one small drop of HIV-infected blood there lies the potential destruction of all human beings. This virus respects no borders and no boundaries. It respects no democracy, no power, no prayer, no money. It cannot tell the difference between Mother Theresa and Charles Manson. It if gets into yet another body, it will replicate.

The massive dying has not yet begun.

I believe we are at war. It is not yet a civil war but five years from now it could be. I know the virus is an enemy that's ominous. It won't adapt to our rules. We have adopted its rules and they are fiendish rules. Stupid rules. And utterly unnecessary rules.

For we, an educated people, should know better.

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We highly recommend the book written by Dr. Lorraine Day for all who desire to be informed about the truth regarding the AIDS epidemic. Censored: AIDS -- What the Government Isn't Telling You is published by Rockford Press, 44-489 Town Center Way, Suite D-412, Palm Desert CA 92260.