A Call for a Re-evaluation of the AIDS Dogma

Syphilis Spirochete By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

A paper about to be published in a scientific journal raises the intriguing possibility that many AIDS cases are in fact misdiagnosed cases of syphilis. The paper was authored by an International group of scientists led by National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, professor of Geo-microbiology in Oldenburg, Germany.

The paper, titled Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of “the great imitator,” will be published in SYMBIOSIS V47, No.1, 2009.

John Scythes, one of the researchers on the paper, reports that he has not found a single case of an immune suppressed patient (regardless of HIV status) who has died of complications of syphilis since the discovery of AIDS in the early 80s. The implications of this are staggering. It is simply not possible that syphilis stopped being fatal just as the new disease of AIDS came on the scene.

The researchers speculate that, because of its immune suppression effect and its ability to imitate other diseases, syphilis is being missed or misdiagnosed as AIDS. Now that improved tests for syphilis infection are available, the researchers urge a large scale investigation into the extent that this is happening.

In addition to Dr. Margulis, other co-authors include Andrew Maniotis PhD. Department of Patholog, University of Illinois at Chicago, J. MacAllister, U. Mass Amherst; J. Scythes of the Community Initiative for AIDS Research, Ontario, Canada; O. Brorson, Tonsberg, Norway; J. Hall, U. Mass. Amherst; W.E. Krumbein, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg Germany; and M.J. Chapman, U. Mass, Amherst.

Ever since Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur in Paris first described HIV virus-like particles isolated from “patient 1” in 1983, a close connection has been shown between AIDS and a history of syphilis exposure.

As with AIDS, patients infected with syphilis do not die from syphilis directly, but rather suffer from opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dysentery.

Syphilis was once known by doctors as “the great imitator” because of its immune suppression effects and its ability to mimic the symptoms of many other diseases. If syphilis and other spirochete diseases are being misdiagnosed as AIDS, that would explain why the number of reported syphilis deaths has plummeted since the introduction of AIDS.

Many human infections such as Lyme disease, syphilis, anthrax and many others are caused by a class of bacteria called spirochetes. These bacteria are characterized by a spiral free swimming form, and by the ability to revert into a cyst form when subjected to threat such as heat, starvation or antibiotic attack. This ability to form cysts (also called “round bodies”) makes spirochete diseases extremely resistant to treatment.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that syphilis is easily treated with antibiotics, the disease is frequently impervious to antibiotic treatment except in its earliest stages. Far from eradicating syphilis, antibiotics have driven the disease underground.

Until recently, the only way to definitively tell if someone had the syphilis germ, was high magnification microscopy by an expert microscopist. Since this is not usually done for patients in a clinical setting, reported cures of either syphilis or Lyme disease are suspect.

Spirochetes are an ancient form of bacteria. The oldest spirochete in the fossil record was discovered in the intestine of a 20 million year old termite preserved in amber.

Scientists know that Lyme and syphilis are caused by spirochete bacteria because the spirochete is able to cause the symptoms of the disease when it is introduced into a healthy test subject. This observation is one of the steps needed to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease. Called Koch’s Postulates, the four steps require that the agent must:
1. be found in all cases of the disease;
2. be isolated from the host;
3. cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host, and
4. then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

While syphilis and Lyme bacteria meet the test of Koch’s postulates, HIV fails all four.

In the case of both Lyme and syphilis, it is very likely that the disease-causing bacteria establishes a permanent human-spirochete symbiosis soon after infection. The symptoms of the disease vary greatly and may be easily overlooked or misinterpreted.

Most spirochetes are harmless, free swimming species in nature, unrelated to any disease, therefore unknown to medical science. Animals and spirochetes have co-existed for millions of years and have co-evolved to the point that they have a symbiotic relationship, a partnership. It is theorized that some components of mammalian cells such as sperm tails and cilia are descended from these ancient bacteria. If this theory is correct, spirochete remnants have dwelled in stable symbiotic partnership inside animal cells for about 1 billion years.

Over eons of time, integrated symbiotic bacteria (which include Lyme and syphilis as well as many other non-pathogenic bacteria) have lost the ability to live independently. They have shed much of their own DNA and have become dependent on the gene products of the human host.

Scientists call this relationship “cyclical symbiosis” and have shown that in this type of symbiosis, virus-like particles are created as part of the integration process between the symbiont partners. These virus-like particles are not the disease-causing agents themselves; they are simply packets of genetic information being exchanged between co-evolved symbionts. Reverse transcriptases and virus-like particles are abundant in such cyclical symbioses.

Is it possible that HIV and other retroviruses are not disease-causing agents at all, but are rather genetic messages being passed between symbiotic partner cells? If so, that would explain why AIDS vaccine trials failed so spectacularly. It would also explain why HIV fails every one of Koch’s postulates for a disease causing agent.

Is it possible that the conventional HIV-AIDS medical orthodoxy is wrong? That certainly would explain why we are no closer to a cure today than we were 25 years ago when AIDS was first discovered; nor have we experienced the long predicted “AIDS pandemic.” There were approximately 1 million AIDS cases in 1990 and there are roughly that number today.

But the implications for public health are far more serious. The ongoing disintegration of the conventional medical theories about HIV-AIDS demonstrates that the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have failed the public spectacularly yet again. It also means that thousands of patients are being erroneously treated with toxic, potentially deadly, AIDS drugs.

The entire HIV-AIDS paradigm must be re-evaluated.