I you request BBFS from garotas what percentage of the girls would agree. Just want to know if this is possible.

Anything is possible...even herpes, hpv, the clap, or HIV. Play it safe...don't be sorry.

You'll get a pretty low percentage of takers, and those who will take you are the ones who will have done so with a hundred other guys and are likely to leave you with a most memorable souvenir...

Steelers
I never request BBFS, because it isn't important enough to me. That said, I'd estimate that it could happen with 25% of the garotas. Don't ask how I know.
Although I might be 'fortunate', to date I have never contracted any STD's or worse. Blood test last week came back clean again.
YMMV
(Disclaimer: This response in no way endorses or promotes unsafe sex)

Thanks for the response Dongringo. I just want to know even though I rarely ever do bare back with a provider. If I did I take precaution like washing and taking a piss right after to flush any potential stuff out. Nice to get a straight answer without the opionated comments.

Steelers
Don't blame those who tell you to be careful. There is an interesting dynamic surrounding bareback sex. Many I've spoken with have had unprotected sex, and will usually admit to it sheepishly. Usually it's with a favorita, who is a service profider. Or they were drunk, etc...
But it does happen.

I conducted a poll at another p4p board about 6 months ago, and there were almost 100 respondents. The results were:

One third of the respondents do not do BBFS with providers.

One fourth do it regularly.

The rest slip into it.

This is not a statement about the wisdom of the practice or lack thereof. Just one piece of information about its prevalence for what it's worth.

The warnings people post in response to this subject are well taken, given the gravity of the risk involved. Some posters go about it more constructively than others. It would be helpful if people address the subject in a non-condescending way (assuming their real goal is good advice not an ego kick at the expense of others). We are all adults here, and we are talking about a prevalent practice, albeit seldom admitted individually.

Check out my poll on 10/25/03 on the same issue. Gives more or less the same results as Sabio's poll.

I would also urge caution for all of the above reasons, but I often wonder what the reason for such warning posts are: You care so much about your fellow mongers and their health and the continued health of the girls, OR, you are deathly afraid of bareback sex yourself and feel better KNOWING that the other guy's cock is going to fall off if HE does it. I mean it HAS TO FALL OFF eventually, right? Or else you might be tempted to go BB too?

Not just the cock falling off, but the falling-over of the thing attached to it.
As Dirty Harry asks "do you feel lucky today?"


(Message edited by bendejo on March 13, 2004)

(Message edited by bendejo on March 13, 2004)

Hey all,
Just signed up for an account again after 2 years MIA.

I've gone BB with one provider, ONCE, and the near hysteria I felt afterwards made me think I'll never do it again. It was one of those situations were we'd been together for several sessions and were beginning to open up to each other. In the heat of the moment neither one of us seemed to care. But man, right after the little head was satisfied and the big head started getting blood again, I was a nervous wreck.

By the way, to celebrate my new found freedom, I'm planning my first trip to Rio during the Memorial day period. Started doing the research today. Since this is my first trip I'm thinking of using the services of some locals.

happyxhoner(formerly xhohner)

even if gonorrea is the mildest thing to get as a holiday"lembranca" it is painfull enough,and worth to avoid by using protection.
iggy.sca
got a small presente from michelle at 4/4

While viral infections (e.g., HIV and herpes) are much harder to get in BBBJ compared to BBFS, bacterial infections (e.g., gonorrhea and syphilis) can be readily caught in BBBJ. The reason I am pointing this out is that BBBJ with providers is accepted regular practice. This means that the risk of bacterial infections is not a sufficient deterrent for many.

Please pardon my ignorance but isn't saliva supposed to be the best antidote against such type of bacteria in the mouth?

Considering that GCL's dog has no STD's, I'd say that's sufficient scientifik evidence fur me

DogGringo
"If ya cun't lick 'em, groin 'em"

This was a topic that I discussed with many during my last visit to Rio. I am sorry, but I tend to agree STRONGLY with Dongringo on this.

My experience has been that 10-15% of W's in Rio will not hardly think twice about BBFS on the first time (Termas girls, Help girls, escort girls, this includes all girls). If you push the issue, I think the percentage is probably closer to 20%. However, on a repeat visit, I would say the number goes up to 33%.

If the girl becomes a favorita and extended periods of time are spent together (i.e., spending a few days and nights together), I would say that BBFS is almost expected by the Garota (BBFS available 75% of the time).

I am fairly rigid about condom usage. However, I must admit, I have engaged in such activities (with regrets to follow). I also know others who have engaged in similar practices.

Do not make the mistake of being naive to the fact that only the "B" team engages in such practices. I have experiences with some girls virtually everyone on this board would consider solid "A" players that clearly demonstrate that BBFS (like it or not) is on the menu.

Again, I do not condone such practices. All test results to date have come back negative (including last Friday's results). Hoping that trend will continue.

Not exactly sure why in the hell I am posting on this topic. I am really bored.

Kenmore,

My experience has been similar to yours, but there is so much more upside than downside. If 10-20% do it, and I believe the number is accurate, then chances of STD increase dramatically. Please don't believe that they only do it for you.

The other one is the mental stuff. Whether they believe it or not, "Ummm. I'm late. It may be you." Who needs that?

Agree with you completely BT.

kenmore

If you want to bareback it in Rio, my experiance is that a Terma garota will play it safe, but Help garotas are another story.

The Garota I pulled out of Help started to bareback with me, I had to stop her and put the condom on myself.

You gotta think with the BIG head guys!

BT - One other mental stress that you may have not considered, and that is the mental stress of having some girl running around Brazil with your name tattoed to her ass/hip. Why do I bring this stuff on myself?

Roadglide - I agree that Help girls usually are more liberal, but I have had more than my share of garotas in the Termas offer up BBFS-----during my very first session with them. That includes girls from Centaurus, Luomo, Solarium, MC, 4x4....about the only place I think it has not been offered is 65.

Kenmore

I'll concur with Kenmore here. I frequent the termas much more than Help so I have greater experience to draw conclusions from there. MOST of the terma girls will go bareback if they've been with you a few times. And there are a substantial minority who will even do it first time with you. I'm really hoping to find out who the girls are at MC, since I lapsed a month ago and did one of them w/o a condom. It's easy to get seduced by the idea that you are special and the girl is during bareback exclusively with you, but that's usually not the case.

Guys...guess what? You aint special. Stop believing it. All you guys with hooker girlfriends who do her bareback are running a huge risk.

Very interesting and educational thread, especially in light of the porn star w/ HIV story in the news. I never had a terma girl offer bareback, and always assumed they didnt do it (and felt a certain safety in that assumption). However, it seems that amongst most Ws in Rio bareback BJs are not only tolerated, but highly preferred. I had difficulty on my recent trip getting any to do covered BJs. I even brought a supply of groovy flavored condoms, which everyone tried, enjoyed tasting, and then promptly ripped off to proceed with BBBJ. Several garotas even asked to keep one "por a presente" but for some reason didnt want to use one on me. Either my natural flavor is more delicious than strawberry, banana, etc. or Ws just dont like licking latex.

I know its the general consensus on boards like this that BBBJ poses no risks, but I do feel a little paranoid now considering that Mr. Porn Star was in Rio about the same time that I was, and I did two garotas, both including the typical BBBJ, at 4 x 4, which is the terma reputed to have just quarantined 16 girls because of his visit there.
Hearing about how prevalent bare back fs is amongst terma girls does make me pause for reflection about the risk level involved in terma activities.

GCL

What do you mean I am not special? I am hurt!

Actually, you are absolutely correct that bareback sex is absolutely stupid and highly risky. I do not condone BBFS. However, I do not condone everyone running around saying that they never do it, when in actuality most slip up every now and again. I think everyone needs to be honest with themselves. This will encourage people to go get tested. Which I have found to be a bit uncomfortable to some degree. I do admit to slipping far more times that I care to think about.

I do think it is important for guys to understand that girls and guys regularly engage in such activities. People are human and fact of the matter is that condoms do reduce the pleasure one can obtain from sex. Thus, people slip up. Which I guess makes it all the more important for each of us to be safe.

I think Catocony hit it right on the head in the post on the 4X4 HIV scare thread. Keep it wrapped boys.

Kenmore

What's the FS stand for. Couldn't find BBFS in the CH Dictionary.

FS = Full Service

Thanks for bringing that up. BBFS has now been added to the dictionary.

Thanks for the insight.

for a split second I thought it meant bare back f**king sh*t..and then said "nahhhh, it couldn't be" lol

Solid,

In Rio, full service routinely includes anal, so you weren't really wrong in your first assumption.

Cat

Guys, I know this topic is a bit old, but hopefully someone out there is willing to respond.

Obviously everyone is worried about STDs, especially HIV. My question is, does anyone out there know anyone who is a hetersexual male who has contracted HIV from vaginal sex with a woman? I specify vaginal sex because anal sex is very dangerous because of the bleeding and torn blood vessals. An acquaintence of mine from New York works at a major public hospital and is an HIV/AIDS counselor. He deals with people who have just tested positive. He told me in a recent discussion that he has NEVER in 12 years come accross any men who have contracted it from a woman. fyi

I dont know anyone who has contracted the disease, nor does anyone I know. Do you? If this behavior were so risky, would'nt the HIV/AIDs epidemic be full blown within the heterosexual community in every country in the world? yet it isnt. If bareback sex posed a high risk for contracting HIV, why would any terma girl do it? Why would girls in AC do it? (i know they want to get pregnant but at the risk of getting HIV, i doubt they'd continue this behavior) Especially since everyone would likely know one of their co-workers who tested positive. This would make all of them super-paranoid, causing everyone to freak out at the thought of going bareback. Think about how paranoid these girls are of having their picture posted on the internet. Don't you think they'd be MUCH more paranoid about catching a deadly disease? All this is not to condone bareback sex because there are still far too many nasty STDs out there to be contracted. It is just food for thought.

So again, my question is, does anyone know any hetersexual men who have contracted HIV from vaginal sex with a woman?

Believe him or not, Magic Johnson has maintained that he never had sex with a man, and he didn't get it through a blood transfusion.

i bet he was banging girls in the ass.

Magic did say that he got to the point where he needed more and more women to satisfy him. No doubt he was getting freaky and banging 6 or 7 girls at a time. In fact he admitted this. He was also likely hitting girls in the ass raw dawg.
On top of that, there is no way that he would EVER admit that he was getting freaky with a man because he has too much to lose.

The porn star (Darren James)who was infected was also doing a TON of anal scenes.

My question remains, does anyone know a heterosexual male who has contracted HIV by having VAGINAL sex with a woman?

Here are some questions that may be stupid, or alternatively insightful.

When a girl has her period, isn't there an equally likely chance of HIV being transmitted through blood as in anal sex? Again, maybe I am missing something here, but tell me if I am.

Also, what is the deal in other parts of the world where there appears to be a much greater incidence of female to male transmission of HIV than in the U.S.? Is it a greater prevalence of anal sex (I've heard this about Africa, but don't really know how accurate it is), a different strain of HIV (if this is the case, won't it catch up with us, particularly those of us who monger outside the U.S.?), or something else (intravaneous drug use (which would not implicate heterosexual contact), etc.)?

A general comment, particularly for those whose friends only started mongering within the last 10 years: the fact none of them have AIDS yet, doesn't mean none of them have HIV. Of course, if they are tested, AND honestly report the test results to others, this would be informative. But merely not knowing any friends with AIDs may not be all that informative (this point, however, does not apply to reports from health care providers about what they have seen in their practices).

I really don't know the answers to these questions. I do know that alot of us would like to think we are safer than the public health authorities might lead us to think we are; OTOH, to the extent people are going to take these risks, we should all strive for the best objective information upon which to judge the real risks to ourselves and others. So, I would be interested in hearing what others have to say and what type of information they have seen.

I agree with drip, although I never go bareback with providers , my friend who is a nurse told me if you have sex with a girl with full blown aids 1000 times bareback odds are you wont get hiv, since the concentration of the virus in vaginal fluid is close to the same in saliva , youd need something like 10 gallons before you find a trace, however if she is constantly getting banged her pussy may be bleeding a little, so the odds would increase, anyway the easiest way to get it is through blood , or getting nuts blown in your ass , either way its not a good idea IMHO

excerpt

Details Magazine, March 2004
Whatever Happened to AIDS and Straight Men?
By Kevin Gray

Since doctors first reported the outbreak of a mysterious new disease in 1981, an estimated 900,000 Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS. Nearly half of them were men who had sex with other men, 27 percent were IV-drug users, and another 7 percent were both. But the politically incorrect truth is rarely spoken out loud: The dreaded heterosexual epidemic never happened.

Straight men and women make up 90 percent of the population, but they account for only 15 percent of non-childhood AIDS cases. Only 6 percent of men with AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, contracted the virus from straight sex. And even that figure doesn't hold up to a closer look. Several studies now suggest that most men who claim they got the virus this way are lying. They got it from sex with other men or sharing needles with addicts. Those studies also show that many women listed in the straight-sex category are either IV-drug users themselves or have likely contracted AIDS from sex with an IV drug user.

Health officials have known these things for years. A growing pile of federally funded reports on HIV transmission, published over the past decade and available to anyone who has the time to read them, shows that men almost never get HIV from women. In fact, according to a 1998 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a disease-free man who has an unprotected one-nighter with a drug-free woman stands a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, it's one in 50 million. He's more likely to be struck by lightning (one in 7000,000).

Female to male transmission is very inefficient, says Dr. Nancy Padian a professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of a 1996 10 year study of HIV infected heterosexual couples, the nation's longest and largest. She points out that "it's two to three times easier for men to infect women." But even so, if there are no other risk factors involved, the rate at which an infected man will transmit the virus to a woman is one in 1,100 sex acts.

Clearly, a single death from this illness is one too many. But AIDS is not killing Americans at the levels of cancer (554,000 deaths in 2001), diabetes (71,000), or Alzheimer's (54,000). In fact, the CDC has not put the disease on its list of the top 15 killers since 1998.

I would agree with the figures the guys mention above. I would say that very few terma girls will bareback you, especially on the first time with them. I have had bb with several terma girls, and was lucky enough to only catch something once (which was easily resolved). Due to that experience I always watch myself now. As for the help girls, I agree with the guy above who said that 15% will do you with no questions asked, more if you push it, and most of them if you are their "boyfriend" or whatever. In fact, a lot of girls have used the line on me, "why don't you stop having sex with other girls so we can start doing it without a condom". Anyway, to each his own and i have certainly made my mistakes but i would recommend a condom for intercourse.

Not that I advocate barebacking streetgirls up the ass or anything, but as I've stated many a time, you're just as likely to pick something nasty up from a little blonde 21 year old college girl in California or Nebraska for that matter, as you are from most working girls. I wouldn't go near a hooker in/from Africa if they were free and begging for it, and I used to wince every time I walked in to a group room at a Soapland in Tokyo and you see 10 couples going away and not a rubber to be found anywhere. But, thinking that one batch of women are the "100% avoid" and another is "100% clean" is a false assumption to make.

My point is, either make a decision to go one of three ways. Be a religious condom user and never fuck a girl without one; buck the trend and try to bareback every chance you get; or be like most guys and generally use a rubber every time out. However, if you take the third option, don't try and "pick your odds", so to speak. Don't think "she looks expensive, so she's clean" or "she screams programa, I'll double up on the rubbers with this one". It does not work this way, gentleman, you never know if someone is 100% clean.

I also read that the strain of aids in africa is different than the one in america , and that one is supposedly found in high concentration in foreskin and vaginal area as opposed to just blood/semen

Talk about a politically incorrect article. It is definitely not what the gays want to hear. What I don't understand is why AIDs, according to the article, is mostly found among gays and drug users in this country while in Africa it is rampant in the entire population. Larrydavid mentions that there are two different strains. However, wasn't AIDs in the US suppose to have originally come from Africa via Cuba and Haiti? There are obviously still a lot of questions about this disease that have yet to be answered.

drip007, check online med journal...i remember reading some studies/case studies a few years back. I believe the odds are more like 1 and 700-800, but the study weren't done using prostitutes with wear and tear pussy as subjects.

With prostitutes, there is the chance that she still has the semen (infected or not) of her previous customer in her pussy, or maybe she just got fucked by an oversized dick, causing her to bleed. If the girls do drugs, the risks increase. many other variables...

that said....hiv is still one of the harder viruses to contract (regualr fs) relative to other stds.

I guess one thing that we haven't mentioned in a while, you could end up with the "classic" STDs if you bareback often enough. Now, we all know guys who have picked up something or another through barebacking

Here is something else I found online that will address somewhat the issue of aids in africa vs. the US and why there is such a disparity among the rates in heterosexuals between the two locations.

AIDS RISK IN AFRICA
VASTLY DIFFERENT FROM WESTERN COUNTRIES OR THE U.S.

The CDC has stated the African AIDs situation has no relevance to most of the rest of the world. The dynamics are just totally different.

In much of rural Africa, male/female anal sex is practiced more than vaginal sex because of the mutilating type of cliteredectomies performed on young girls. They are sometime sewn up so tightly as to restrict menstrual flow, and if they ever succeed in becoming pregnant, must be cut open to deliver the baby. Because of this, anal sex is more prevalent. And if vaginal sex is attempted, there is much abrasion and bleeding, both conditions which are common in anal sex and the means by which AIDS is most easily spread.

Prostitute studies in other areas, especially the sex capitals of Asia show prostitution is not spreading HIV to the millions of male customers. This also shows the low risk of female to male heterosexual transfer. Clearly prostitution has never been a vector for HIV in the U.S. or other Western countries. Absent STD sores on the penis, it is very very difficult to transfer HIV female to male via sex.

In Africa there are all sorts of rituals (circumcision, excision, scarification, body piercing, and others) that use very unsanitary conditions with cutting tools used on many people without any cleaning. Whole generations of boys and girls can be contaminated by a single knife. in a village. Men have ornaments in their penis creating open sores and STD's are extremely common. HIV is easily spread when you have open STD sores which is common in Africa.

In Africa, a phenomenal amount of HIV is transferred by hospitals who don't have funds to check for HIV for blood transfusions. Most African hospitals reuse syringes till they are so dull they won't puncture skin. Most African hospitals don't have the funds for autoclaves to sterilize surgical instruments to western standards.

African Prostitutes and other women commonly use various methods to "dry out" their vaginas (sometimes with detergent) to increase friction during intercourse, which also then increases the risk for abrasions and HIV infection.

Also Africa has a very high rate of TB which has been shown to be closely associated with potentially developing AIDS.

AIDS is certain conditions and lowered immune response that has been common in Africa for centuries. Some of what is now AIDS is the new name for old diseases that result from inadequate health care, widespread malnutrition, endemic infections and unsanitary water supplies.

Even the definition of AIDS differs from one continent to another. In Europe and America, AIDS-defining diseases include 29 unrelated maladies ranging from pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and pulmonary tuberculosis to cervical cancer. In addition, an HIV-positive test and a T-cell count below 200 are necessary for a confirmed diagnosis.

But in Africa, the term "AIDS" is used to describe symptoms associated with a number of previously known diseases. In the mid-1980s, those common diseases were suddenly reclassified as "special opportunistic AIDS-related infections"

So why are AIDS cases in Africa nearly evenly divided between men and women? The answer lies in the World Health Organization's definition of "AIDS" in Africa which differs decisively from AIDS in the West. The WHO's clinical-case definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in 1985) is not based on an HIV test or T-cell counts but on the combined symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, 10 percent body weight loss in two months and a persistent cough, none of which are new or uncommon on the African continent.

HIV TESTS are notoriously unreliable in Africa. A 1994 study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases concluded that HIV tests were useless in central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70 percent false positive results.

Furthermore, everything we know about viruses tells us that they are equal opportunity microbes. They will attack men and women weakened by malnutrition, the most effective cause of immune suppression. Venereal diseases left untreated can also impair one's immunity, rendering any victim susceptible to other infections. Africans are often assumed to die from "AIDS-like" symptoms after their immune systems have been weakened by malaria, tuberculosis, cholera or parasitic diseases.

Of course, people everywhere should be encouraged to behave more thoughtfully in their sexual lives. They should be provided with reliable counseling about condom use, contraception, family planning and venereal diseases. But whether in Cameroon or California, sex education must no longer be distorted by terrifying, dubious misinformation that equates sex with death.

Don't forget HIV/AIDS is not the only STD you can catch.

Chlamydia, Genital warts, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Genital herpes.

Do you want to catch any of those? I don't!

Gr8ter,

Can you tell me where this information you posted came from? (provide the link).

I'm curious because I'm a consultant to the CDC , and I can assure that not only have they never said what is attributed to them, but they never would. They simply do not make such definitive statements. We researchers never do ;-)

Most of the rest of the article is loaded with BS. Having attended the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok last July I can assure you that there were dozens of papers presented on heterosexual, and female to male, transmission. It's quite prevalent in Asia. Male to female transmission is far more common, but not all those HIV+ men out there were infected by men or needles or through anal sex (which isn't prevalent in Asia).

I won't bother to counter the other erroneous statements in the article--this stuff has been floating around for at least 10 years and has been thoroughly discounted by all but the conspiracy theorists among us.

Sure, the links are as follows:

the first link i will provide it to the homepage of the cdc and their aids statistics. as you can see from this link, the cdc (on their website) clearly states that according to their figures, out of about 950,000 total aids cases reported in the US through 2003, only 150,000 are attributed to heterosexual sexual contact (and remember that this number includes those who have heterosexual anal sex and sex with IV drug users, so obviously the number for those not having heterosexual anal sex or sex with iv drug users would be lower than this). considering there are roughly 250,000,000 americans who are heterosexuals who do not us iv drugs and are not homosexuals, that is a very low percentage of infections for this class of person.

additionally, out of 750,000 cases for males, only 56,000 were attributable to heterosexual contact according to the cdc, and i believe it is reasonable to believe that many of these men are lying, as the author of the details article points to.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats.htm

the second link is to the details article in full, which is basically based on the cdc facts and interviews.

http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/risk_realities/whatever_happened.html

the third link is for the last article, dealing with the differences between africa and the us in transmission rates in heterosexuals. admittedly this is subjecture but it seems reasonable to me unless you are aware of a better explaination for the disparity.

http://www.libchrist.com/std/africa.html

(Message edited by gr8ter on January 09, 2005)

I'm not sure I'll accept the Liberated Christians as a valid resource when the topic is sex and health.

haha, valid point, but that is only one of the links. i am as curious as anyone as to why the rates are different and regardless of who they are, their explanations seem reasonable. anyone else got other explanations of why it is more present in africa than in the us among heterosexuals?

but that is a sideline issue (why there is so much aids in africa), the original point is the heterosexual aids prevelance in the united states and it appears to me that the facts there speak for themselves as presented in my last post.

I am definitely not saying to have unprotected sex, just pointing out some facts.

(Message edited by gr8ter on January 09, 2005)

Wow guys, this is an impressive discussion. I found out quite a bit of info at www.virusmyth.com. There are zillions of articles, many of them challenging the lack of evidence that HIV even causes AIDs in the first place.

Check this link specifically: http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data2/introduction.htm

I agree with Gr8ter and everyone else that I am NOT condoning bareback sex with just anyone. But it is also good to know the truth and what the real risks are.

I also agree that having genital warts wouldn't be any fun. Errrr.

Read some of these articles as they are VERY good and thought provoking to say the least.

Most people believe they know what causes AIDS. For a decade, scientist, government officials, physicians, journalists, public-service ads, TV shows, and movies have told them that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus called HIV. This virus supposedly infects and kills the "T-cells" of the immune system, leading to an inevitably, fatal immune deficiency after an asymptomatic period that averages 10 years or so. Most people do not know-because there has been a visual media blackout on the subject-about a longstanding scientific controversy over the cause of AIDS. A controversy that has become increasingly heated as the official theory's predictions have turned out to be wrong.

Leading biochemical scientists, including University of California at Berkeley retrovirus expert Peter Duesberg and Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert, have been warning for years that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. The warnings were met first with silence, then with ridicule and contempt. In 1990, for example, Nature published a rare response from the HIV establishment, as represented by Robin A. Weiss of the Institute of Cancer Research in London and Harold W. Jaffe of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Weiss and Jaffe compared the doubters to people who think that bad air causes malaria. "We have . . . been told," they wrote, "that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) originates from outer space, or as a genetically engineered virus for germ warfare which was tested in prisoners and spread from them. Peter H. Duesberg's proposition that HIV is not the cause of AIDS at all is, to our minds, equally absurd." Viewers of ABC's 1993 Day One special on the cause of AIDS-almost the only occasion on which network television has covered the controversy-saw Robert Gallo, the leading exponent of the HIV theory, stomp away from the microphone in a rage when asked to respond to the views of Gilbert and Duesberg.

Such displays of rage and ridicule are familiar to those who question the HIV theory of AIDS. Ever since 1984, when Gallo announced the discovery of what the newspapers call "HIV, the virus that causes AIDS," at a government press conference, the HIV theory has been the basis of all scientific work on AIDS. If the theory is mistaken, billions of dollars have been wasted-and immense harm has been done to persons who have tested positive for antibodies to HIV and therefore have been told to expect an early and painful death. The furious reactions to the suggestion that a colossal mistake may have been made are not surprising, given that the credibility of the biomedical establishment is at stake. It is time to think about the unthinkable, however, because there are at least three reasons for doubting the official theory that HIV causes AIDS.

First, after spending billions of dollars, HIV researchers are still unable to explain how HIV, a conventional retrovirus with a very simple genetic organization, damages the immune system, much less how to stop it. The present stalemate contrasts dramatically with the confidence expressed in 1984. At that time Gallo thought the virus killed cells directly by infecting them, and U.S. government officials predicted a vaccine would be available in two years. Ten years later no vaccine is in sight, and the certainty about how the virus destroys the immune system has dissolved in confusion.

Second, in the absence of any agreement about how HIV causes AIDS, the only evidence that HIV does cause AIDS is correlation. The correlation is imperfect at best, however. There are many cases of persons with all the symptoms of AIDS who do not have any HIV infection. There are also many cases of persons who have been infected by HIV for more than a decade and show no signs of illness.

Third, predictions based on the HIV theory have failed spectacularly. AIDS in the United States and Europe has not spread through the general population. Rather, it remains almost entirely confined to the original risk groups, mainly sexually promiscuous gay men and drug abusers. The number of HIV-infected Americans has remained constant for years instead of increasing rapidly as predicted, which suggests that HIV is an old virus that has been with us for centuries without causing an epidemic.

No one disputes what happens in the early stages of HIV infection. As other viruses do, HIV multiplies rapidly, and it sometimes is accompanied by a mild, flulike illness. At this stage, while the virus is present in great quantity and causing at most mild illness in the ordinary way, it does no observable damage to the immune system. On the contrary, the immune system rallies as it is supposed to do and speedily reduces the virus to negligible levels. Once this happens, the primary infection is over. If HIV does destroy the immune system, it does so years after the immune system has virtually destroyed it. By then the virus typically infects very few of the immune system' s T-cells.

Before these facts were well understood, Robert Gallo and his followers insisted that the virus does its damage by directly infecting and killing cells. In his 1991 autobiography, Gallo ridiculed HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier's view that the virus causes AIDS only in the company of as yet undiscovered "cofactors." Gallo argued that "multifactorial is multi-ignorance" and that, because being infected by HIV was "like being hit by a truck," there was no need to look for additional causes or indirect mechanisms of causation.

All that has changed. As Warner C. Greene, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explained in the September 1993 Scientific American, researchers are increasingly abandoning the direct cell-killing theory because HIV does not infect enough cells: "Even in patients in the late stages of HIV infection with very low blood T4 cell counts, the proportion of those cells that are producing HIV is tiny-about one in 40. In the early stages of chronic infection, fewer than one in 10,000 T4 cells in blood are doing so. If the virus were killing the cells just by directly infecting them, it would almost certainly have to infect a much larger fraction at any one time."

Gallo himself is now among those who are desperately looking for possible co-factors and exploring indirect mechanisms of causation. Perhaps the virus somehow causes other cells of the immune system to destroy T-cells or induces the T-cells to destroy themselves. Perhaps HIV can cause immune-system collapse even when it is no long present in the body. As Gallo put it at an AIDS conference last summer: "The molecular mimicry in which HIV imitates components of the immune system sets events into motion that may be able to proceed in the absence of further whole virus."

But researchers have not been able to confirm experimentally any of the increasingly exotic causal mechanisms that are being proposed, and they do not agree about which of the competing explanations is more plausible. When The New York Times interviewed the government' s head AIDS researcher, Anthony Fauci, in February, reporter Natalie Angier summarized his view as a sort of stew of all the leading possibilities: "It [HIV] overexcites some immune signaling pathways, while eluding the detection of others. And though the main target of the virus appears to be the famed helper T-cells, or CD-4 cells, which it can infiltrate and kill, the virus also ends up stimulating the response of other immune cells so inappropriately that they eventually collapse from overwork or confusion." No other virus is credited with such a dazzling repertoire of destructive skills.

Perhaps it is the HIV scientists who are collapsing from overwork or confusion. The theory is getting ever more complicated, without getting any nearer to a solution. This is a classic sign of a deteriorating scientific paradigm. But as HIV scientists grow ever more confused about how the virus is supposed to be causing AIDS, their refusal to consider the possibility that it may not be the cause is as rigid as ever. On the rare occasions when they answer questions on the subject, they explain that "unassailable epidemiological evidence" has established HIV as the cause of AIDS. In short, they rely on correlation.

The seemingly close correlation between AIDS and HIV is largely an artifact of the misleading definition of AIDS used by the U.S. government' s Centers for Disease Control. AIDS is a syndrome defined by the presence of one or more of 30 independent diseases-when accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV. The same disease conditions are not defined as AIDS when the antibody test is negative. Tuberculosis with a positive antibody test is AIDS; tuberculosis with a negative test is just TB.

The skewed definition of AIDS makes a close correlation with HIV inevitable, regardless of the facts. This situation was briefly exposed at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam in 1992, when the existence of dozens of suppressed "AIDS without HIV" cases first became publicly known. Instead of considering the obvious implications of these cases for the HIV theory, the authorities at the CDC, who had known about some of the cases for years but had kept the subject under wraps, quickly buried the anomaly by inventing a new disease called ICL (Idiopathic CD4+Lympho-cytopenia)--a conveniently forgettable name that means "AIDS without HIV."

There are probably thousands of cases of AIDS without HIV in the United States alone. Peter Duesberg found 4,621 cases recorded in the literature, 1,691 of them in this country. (Such cases tend to disappear from the official statistics because, once it's clear that HIV is absent, the CDC no longer counts them as AIDS.) In a 1993 article published in Bio/Technology, Duesberg documented the consistent failure of the CDC to report on the true incidence of positive HIV tests in AIDS cases. The CDC concedes that at least 40,000 "AIDS cases" were diagnosed on the basis of presumptive criteria-that is, without antibody testing, on the basis of diseases such as Kaposi's sarcoma. Yet these diseases can occur without HIV or immune deficiency. Perhaps some of the patients diagnosed as having AIDS would have tested negative, or actually did test negative, for HIV. Physicians and health departments have an incentive to diagnose patients with AIDS symptoms as AIDS cases whenever they can, because the federal government pays the medical expenses of AIDS patients under the Ryan White Act but not of persons equally sick with the same diseases who test negative for HIV antibodies.

The claimed correlation between HIV and AIDS is flawed at an even more fundamental level, however. Even if the "AIDS test" were administered in every case, the tests are unreliable. Authoritative papers in both Bio/Technology (June 1993) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (November 27, 1991) have shown that the tests are not standardized and give many "false positives" because they react to substances other than HIV antibodies. Even if that were not the case, the tests at best confirm the presence of antibodies and not the virus itself, much less the virus in an active, replicating state. Antibodies typically mean that the body has fought off a viral infection, and they may persist long after the virus itself has disappeared from the body. Since it is often difficult to find live virus even in the bodies of patients who are dying of AIDS, Gallo and others have to speculate that HIV can cause AIDS even when it is no longer present and only antibodies are left.

Just as there are cases of AIDS without HIV, there are cases of HIV-positive persons who remain healthy for more than a decade and who may never suffer from AIDS. According to Greene's article in Scientific American, "It is even possible that some rare strains [of HIV] are benign. Some homosexual men in the U.S. who have been infected with HIV for at least 11 years show as yet no signs of damage to their immune systems. My colleagues . . .and I are studying these long-term survivors to ascertain whether something unusual about their immune systems explains their response or whether they carry an avirulent strain of the virus."

The faulty correlation between HIV and AIDS would not disprove the HIV theory if there were strong independent evidence that HIV causes AIDS. As we have seen, however, researchers have been unable to establish a mechanism of causation. Nor have they succeeded in confirming the HIV model by inducing AIDS in animals. Chimps have repeatedly been infected with HIV, but none of them have developed AIDS. In the absence of a mechanism or an animal model, the HIV theory is based only upon a correlation that turns out to be primarily an artifact of the theory itself.

In light of the importance of the correlation argument, it is astonishing that no controlled studies have been done for three of the major risk groups: transfusion recipients, hemophiliacs, and drug abusers. Two ostensibly controlled studies involving men's groups in Vancouver and San Francisco purportedly show that AIDS developed only in the HIV-positive men and never in the "control group" of HIV negatives. These studies were designed not to test the HIV theory but to measure the rate at which HIV-positive gay men develop AIDS. They did not compare otherwise similar persons who differ only in HIV status, did not control effectively for drug use, and did not fully report the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases in the HIV-negative men. The research establishment accepted these studies uncritically because they give the HIV theory some badly needed support. But the main point they supposedly prove has already been thoroughly disproved: AIDS does occur in HIV-negative persons.

According to the official theory, HIV is a virus newly introduced into the American population, which has had no opportunity to develop any immunity. It follows that viral infection should spread rapidly, moving from the original risk groups (gays, drug addicts, transfusion recipients) into the general population. This is what the government agencies confidently predicted, and AIDS advertising to this day emphasizes the theme that "everyone is at risk."

The facts are otherwise. AIDS is still confined mainly to the original risk groups, and AIDS patients in the United States are still almost 90-percent male. Health-care workers, who are constantly exposed to blood and bodily fluids of AIDS patients, have no greater risk of contracting AIDS that the population at large. Among millions of health- care workers, the CDC claims only seven or eight (poorly documented) cases of AIDS supposedly developed through occupational exposure. By contrast, the CDC estimates that accidental needle sticks lead to more than 1,500 cases of hepatitis infection each year. Even prostitutes are not at risk for AIDS unless they also use drugs.

Far from threatening the general heterosexual population, AIDS is confined mainly to drug users and gay men in specific urban neighborhoods. According to a 1992 report by the prestigious U.S. National Research Council, "The convergence of evidence shows that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is settling into spatially and socially isolated groups and possibly becoming endemic within them." This factual picture is so different from what the theory predicts, and so threatening to funding, that the AIDS agencies have virtually ignored the National Research Council report and have continued to preach the fiction that "AIDS does not discriminate."

Not only is AIDS mostly confined to isolated groups in a few U.S. cities, but HIV infection is not increasing. Although a virus newly introduced to a susceptible population should spread rapidly, for several years the CDC has estimated that a steady 1 million Americans are HIV positive. Now it appears that the figure of 1 million is finally about to be revised-downward. According to a story by Lawrence Altman in the March 1 New York Times, new statistical studies indicate that only about 700,000 Americans are HIV positive, and the official estimate will accordingly be reduced sometime this summer.

While HIV infection remains steady at this modest level in the United States, World Health Organization officials claim that the same virus is spreading rapidly in Africa and Asia, creating a vast "pandemic" that threatens to infect at least 40 million people by the year 2000, unless billions of dollars are provided for prevention to the organizations sounding the alarm. These worldwide figures, especially from Africa, are used to maintain the thesis that "everyone is at risk" in the United States. Instead of telling Americans that AIDS cases here are almost 90-percent male, authorities say that worldwide the majority of AIDS sufferers are female. With the predictions of a mass epidemic in America and Europe failing so dramatically, AIDS organizations rely on the African figures to vindicate their theory.

But these African figures are extremely soft, based almost entirely on "clinical diagnoses," without even inaccurate HIV testing. What this means in practice is that Africans who die of diseases that have long been common there---especially wasting disease accompanied by diarrhea-are now classified as AIDS victims. Statistics on "African AIDS" are thus extremely manipulable, and witnesses are emerging who say that the epidemic is greatly exaggerated, if it exists at all.

In October 1993, the Sunday Times of London reported on interviews with Philippe and Evelyne Krynen, heads of a 230-employee medical relief organization in the Kagera province of Tanzania. The Krynens had first reported on African AIDS in 1989 and at that time were convinced that Kagera in particular was in the grip of a vast epidemic. Subsequent years of medical work in Kagera have changed their minds. They have learned that what they had thought were "AIDS orphans" were merely children left with relatives by parents who had moved away and that HIV-positive and HIV-negative villagers suffer from the same diseases and respond equally well to treatment. Philippe Krynen's verdict: "There is no AIDS. It is something that has been invented. There are no epidemiological grounds for it; it doesn't exist for us."

Krynen's remark calls attention to the fact that AIDS is not a disease. Rather, it is a syndrome defined by the presence of any of 30 separate and previously known diseases, accompanied by the actual or suspected presence of HIV. The definition has changed over time and is different for Africa (where HIV testing is rare) than for Europe and North America. The official CDC definition of AIDS in the United States was enormously broadened for 1993 in order to distribute more federal AIDS money to sick people, especially women with cervical cancer. As a direct result, AIDS cases more than doubled in 1993. Absent the HIV mystique, there would be no reason to believe that a single factor is causing cervical cancer in women, Kaposi's sarcoma in gay males, and slim disease in Africans.

The HIV paradigm is failing every scientific test. Research based upon it has failed to provide not only a cure or vaccine but even a theoretical explanation for the disease-causing mechanism. Such success as medical science has had with AIDS has come not from the futile attempts to attack HIV with toxic antiviral drugs like AZT but from treating the various AIDS-associated diseases separately. Predictions based on the HIV theory have been falsified or are supported only by dubious statistics based mainly on the theory itself. Yet the HIV establishment continues to insist that nothing is wrong and to use its power to exclude dissenting voices, however eminent in science, from the debate.

Like other leaders of the scientific establishment, Nature Editor John Maddox is fiercely protective of the HIV theory. He indignantly rejected a scientific paper making the same points as this article. When Duesberg first argued his case in 1989 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the editor promised that his paper would be answered by an article defending the orthodox viewpoint. The response never came. The editors of the leading scientific journals have refused to print even the brief statement of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, which has over 300 members. The statement notes simply that "many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis" and calls for "a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis."

Such a reappraisal would include the following elements:

Genuinely controlled epidemiological studies of all the major risk groups:homosexuals, drug users, transfusion recipients, and hemophiliacs. The studies should employ an unbiased definition of AIDS. Too often we have been told that HIV always accompanies AIDS, only to learn that this is so because AIDS without HIV is named something else. The studies should be performed by persons who are committed to investigating the HIV theory rather than defending it. There is reason to suspect that properly controlled studies of transfusion recipients and hemophiliacs in particular will show that the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases is independent of HIV status.

An audit of the CDC statistics to remove HIV bias and thereby allow unprejudiced testing of the critical epidemiological evidence for the theory. Every effort should be made to determine how many AIDS patients were actually tested for antibodies and the testing method that was employed. Because even the most reliable antibody test generates many false-positive results, researchers should try to validate the tests by examining random samples of AIDS patients to determine whether significant amounts of replicating HIV can be found in their bodies. Statistics have been kept as if the purpose were to protect the HIV theory rather than to learn the truth.

Research focusing on the cause of particular diseases rather than the politically defined hodgepodge of diseases we now call AIDS. The cancer-like skin disease called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) is one of the best-known AIDS-defining conditions, but leading KS and HIV experts Marcus Conant and Robin Weiss now say that dozens of non-HIV KS cases are under study in the United States and that KS is becoming much less frequent in gay male AIDS patients than it formerly was. Conant, Weiss, and other AIDS researchers now frankly attribute KS to an "unknown infectious agent" rather than to HIV, but KS is nonetheless still called AIDS when it occurs in combination with HIV. Duesberg attributes KS in gay males to the use of amyl nitrates (poppers) as a sexual stimulant. His theory is eminently testable, and it ought to be given a fair chance. Another example: Hemophiliacs in the age of AIDS are living longer than they ever did in the past, but they still often die of conditions related to receipt of the blood concentrate called Factor VIII. Research published in The Lancet in February confirms earlier reports that symptoms diagnosed as AIDS are best treated by providing a highly purified form of Factor VIII. Researchers should study the role of blood-product impurities in causing disease in hemophiliacs, without the distortion that comes from arbitrarily assuming that HIV is responsible whenever an HIV-positive hemophiliac becomes ill.

A critical re-examination of the statistics for AIDS and HIV in Africa and Asia. Researchers should perform new, controlled studies of representative African populations to test the relationship of confirmed HIV infection to the incidence of AIDS-defining diseases. It will not do to rely upon "presumptive diagnoses" or extrapolations from single antibody tests that are now well known to generate many false positives.

The HIV establishment and its journalist allies have replied to various specific criticisms of the HIV theory without taking them seriously. They have never provided an authoritative paper that undertakes to prove that HIV really is the cause of AIDS-meaning a paper that does not start by assuming the point at issue. The HIV theory was established as fact by Robert Gallo's official press conference in 1984, before any papers were published in American journals. Thereafter, the research agenda was set in concrete, and skeptics were treated as enemies to be ignored or punished. As a result, the self-correcting processes of science have broken down, and journalists have not known how to ask the hard questions. After 10 years of failure, it is time to take a second look. *

Charles A. Thomas Jr., a biochemist, is president of the Helicon Foundation in San Diego and secretary of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis. Kary B. Mullis is the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique, for detecting DNA, which is used to search for fragments of HIV in AIDS patients. Phillip E. Johnson is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.