Aging HIV+ Patients Have More to Worry About

Now that HIV co-discoverer and Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier admits that HIV is easily cured within weeks with a good diet without HIV drugs, these deadly and highly addictive AIDS drugs are finally sickening and killing patients in ways that HIV never did - exposing the corrupt makers of these drugs and the so-called "research centers" at Cornell and Harvard.

To their defense come the gay activists at the Treatment Action Group (TAG). To understand what they're defending, let's read about someone who bought into the HIV mythology and is now dying from the drugs that harmed him more than the harmless retrovirus ever could.

After testing HIV+ in 2001, James L. (46) went on a drug cocktail and life returned to normal with little effort. His exercise regime only intensified. He even went back to school for a master’s degree. At work, he rose to a six-figure position at a telecommunications firm, and his personal life flourished. He was a regular gay male:

Then, halfway through a screening of the film Syriana in his local cinema, he had a disturbing revelation. “He sat through about half the movie before he realized suddenly that he had seen the same movie two weeks earlier,” says Simpson. Indeed, James ultimately pieced together evidence suggesting he’d seen the film on three separate occasions. The same problem haunted him at work. Where he had once earned praise for his organizational skills, he now drew warnings. He seemed incapable of recalling recent events with any reliability. “It’s an Alzheimer’s-like state,” he explains. Earlier this year, Simpson diagnosed him with HIV-associated cognitive motor disorder.

James is on medical disability today, acutely aware of what he is missing. “I want more out of life,” he told me one afternoon recently. “I spent a lot of money on my education, and this barrier might keep me from enjoying my fifties and sixties. But I’m much more concerned about my financials than my own health at the moment. People like me in the business world? I don’t believe they go together well.”

Some fifteen years into the era of protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, doctors are realizing that the miracles the drugs promised are not necessarily a lasting solution to the disease. Most news accounts today call HIV a chronic, manageable disease. But patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. Early senility turns out to be an increasingly common problem, though not nearly as extreme as James’s in every case. One large-scale multi-city study released its latest findings this summer that over half of the HIV-positive population is suffering some form of cognitive impairment. Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis.

Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers.

Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question and certainly varies from patient to patient and condition to condition. Either way, it is now clear that even patients who respond well to medications by today’s standards are not out of the woods. Current life-expectancy charts show that people on HIV medications could live twenty fewer years on average than the general population. “It’s spooky,” says Mark Harrington, who heads Treatment Action Group, a New York–based HIV think tank. “It seems like the virus keeps finding new tricks to throw at us, and we’re just all left behind going, What’s going on?” (more)

Treatment Action Group (TAG) is part of the problem. Although it calls itself a think tank, TAG is one of dozens of gay pharmaceutical front groups that run interference for the AIDS industry that funds them. One of their think-tankers (Richard Jefferys) is currently being sued in the NY Supreme Court for using libel to cover up pharmaceutical corruption. Then again, what can we expect from an organization that was founded by gay crystal meth addicts?