NotAIDS! Comment
by The Editor

And in point of fact, the dermatologists, when they looked back and began to see that there were a fair number of patients in their gay practices who had Kaposi's sarcoma but who ended up not having HIV. - Dr. John Ziegler

Remember PCP and KS, the scourge of gay men in cities across America? They were the face of AIDS. They WERE AIDS - later named HIV, said to be the underlying cause of AIDS.

What if they weren't AIDS? Would that beg the question, "What is AIDS anyway?"

Is it clear that what was referred to as PCP - an acronym for pneumocystis carinii pneumonia even related to AIDS? Kaposi's sarcoma, another early AIDS-defining illness, is now known to be NOT AIDS.

PCP, a fungal infection of the lungs, started as a small cluster of contagious infections under the tutelage of Los Angeles-based Dr. Gottlieb, who was in close touch with the Feds at CDC.

It eventually morphed first into GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) and then into "AIDS" in this concerted effort to see it not as any other cluster but as a homosexual cluster of immune dysfunction, as if therein lived the aetiology of the great and powerful mystery of gay men who fell ill.

No matter that almost every parasite harmful to humans causes immune dysfunction, and they are usually contagious.

As titillating as gay sex may be, and as feasible may it be that PCP or KS was a proximity-related fraternally infectious bubble, it still has never been proven that PCP, or KS, for another matter, was related to someone's testing positive for HIV.

The tests of course came later, after the initial PCP/ KS clusters had run their course when Gallo monetized the whole mess with the erstwhile "HIV test" marketed for gay men. Erstwhile, because if you've read the labels of any such test, they don't actually test for HIV.

History speaks volumes and it is instructional in this excerpt from interviews conducted in 1993 and 1994 by Sally Smith Hughes, Ph.D with Dr. John Ziegler.¹

Hughes:
In the early days, when it was pretty much you alone seeing AIDS patients at the VA, how did you deal with opportunistic infections? You presumably are not an expert on infectious disease. How did you handle patients with problems that really weren't in your territory?

Ziegler:
Well, they were partly in my territory, insofar as a chemotherapist renders people immunodepressed with cytotoxins. So as a profession, we have to deal with opportunistic infections. In fact, a lot of the early cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia were seen in leukemia patients who were treated with prednisone. So I was pretty familiar with the opportunistic infections, and we just treated them as part of our daily oncologic experience.

Hughes:
I read of an NCI [National Cancer Institute] program called SEER [Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results] which found that the incidence of KS prior to 1980 in various participating cities, San Francisco being one of them, was several times higher than in cities such as Atlanta and Denver where AIDS is relatively rare.

What does that mean?

Ziegler:
There's a long story around KS and its epidemiology. But the short version is that most people think that KS is caused by an infectious agent, not HIV, but an agent that is passed along with it, and that these were really two independent epidemics, both following pretty much the pattern of advanced promiscuity in the homosexual community in the seventies.

And in point of fact, the dermatologists, when they looked back and began to see that there were a fair number of patients in their gay practices who had Kaposi's sarcoma but who ended up not having HIV.

---

1. Excerpted from "The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Medical Response 1981-1984, Volume IV - An oral history conducted in 1993 and 1994" at the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1997.

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