[Letter to Colleagues from Peter Duesberg]

Review of "The Role of Drugs in the Origin of AIDS" by Peter H. Duesberg.
I think this paper is appropriate for publication i PNAS. It compiles
from the literature an attack on a generally accepted scientific dogma: that
HIV is the cause of AIDS. The attack suggests lines of research and raises
reasonable questions that deserve a hearing.
Dr. Duesberg's argument is that a major cause of AIDS deaths may be
intravenous or oral drug-induced or AZT-induced. Even though he has discussed
his arguments against a pure HIV causation of AIDS in an earlier paper, I think
he should provide a few paragraphs in this paper discussing the following
issues: How is a drug causation of the AIDS constellation of diseases, as a sole
cause argument, to be rjci~edwith apparently infectious cases of AIDS?
Those cases would be the he-o hiliacswithKAIDS, occasionally publicized
families of hemophiliacs, womn b7trasusion, the young women who was the
AIDS dentist's patient, and the issue of babies with AIDS and the view that
infants with HIV will progress to AIDS ra l.Are these all anecdotes and
wrong? Or do the cases involve hidden drug use? Does a child have AIDS due to
e drug use in the mother? Is it Dr. Duesberg's view that the children with HV
P"~- who are raised in healthy environments progress to AIDS because of AZT
treatment?
One should make clear whether the drug/AIDS hypothesis involves drugs
as a sole cause or whether a varet of causes is contemplated: perhaps a larg
fraction of the cases commonly thought of as having a virally-induced disease
are actually immune and nervous system failures produced by a variety of
drugs, while a minority of cases are induced by other agents, either unknown
infectious agents, or the virus plus other infectious agents. I think a clear
ds" response is needed to -the thought in the mind of the general reader: since som
examples of AIDS appear to be an infection, it therefore follows that all AID
must be infectious.
S. The material on pages 6-10 should be reworked.,Top of page 6, 1st sentence: c-m
SThe arguments icrr ons suggest the consumption of intravenous7
V~gdrugs~j by itself sufficie rijo cause diseases. * * * ar rn. Such arguments.
~seem to be saying, in line 7, that drugs are a sufficient cause of tuberculosis. I
doubt this is what the author actually means. The argument that HIV is

observed in only 22 out of 50 pneumonia deaths among IV drug users is an
that HIV does not cause pneumonia ut nio an ru
e stronger i one cited examples of infections that are subsequent to an
C-s immune system defect and that appeared in drug users in the absence of HIV.
(The unstated premise in much of this is that the diseases that one is talking