[2][3] The most prominent supporters of the hypothesis are Duesberg himself, biochemist and vitamin proponent David Rasnick, and journalist Celia Farber.
[2] Several studies have specifically addressed Duesberg's claim that recreational drug abuse or sexual promiscuity were responsible for the manifestations of AIDS.
"[8] A large prospective study followed a group of 715 homosexual men in the Vancouver, Canada, area; approximately half were HIV-seropositive or became so during the follow-up period, and the remainder were HIV-seronegative.
[15] However, with the use of modern culture techniques and polymerase chain reaction testing, HIV can be demonstrated in virtually all patients with AIDS.
What Duesberg calls "the myth of an African AIDS epidemic,"[20] among people"[21] exists for several reasons, including: Duesberg states that African AIDS cases are "a collection of long-established, indigenous diseases, such as chronic fevers, weight loss, alias "slim disease," diarrhea, and tuberculosis"[1] that result from malnutrition and poor sanitation.
Consistent with this hypothesis, studies that report the highest rates of PCP in Africa are those that use the most advanced diagnostic methods"[34] Duesberg also claims that Kaposi's sarcoma is "exclusively diagnosed in male homosexual risk groups using nitrite inhalants and other psychoactive drugs as aphrodisiacs",[1] but the cancer is fairly common among heterosexuals in some parts of Africa,[35] and is found in heterosexuals in the United States as well.
[36] Because reported AIDS cases in Africa and other parts of the developing world include a larger proportion of people who do not belong to Duesberg's preferred risk groups of drug addicts and male homosexuals,[37] Duesberg writes on his website that "There are no risk groups in Africa, like drug addicts and homosexuals."
[40][41] South African president Thabo Mbeki accepted Duesberg's hypothesis and, through the mid-2000s, rejected offers of medical assistance to fight HIV infection, a policy of inaction that cost over 300,000 lives.
[44] Duesberg claims that the supposedly innocuous nature of all retroviruses is supported by what he considers to be their normal mode of proliferation: infection from mother to child in utero.
[44]The consensus in the scientific community is that the Duesberg hypothesis has been refuted by a large and growing mass of evidence showing that HIV causes AIDS, that the amount of virus in the blood correlates with disease progression, that a plausible mechanism for HIV's action has been proposed, and that anti-HIV medication decreases mortality and opportunistic infection in people with AIDS.
The NIAID reports that in the mid-1980s, clinical trials enrolling patients with AIDS found that AZT given as single-drug therapy conferred a modest survival advantage compared [with] placebo.
Among HIV-infected patients who had not yet developed AIDS, placebo-controlled trials found that AZT given as single-drug therapy delayed, for a year or two, the onset of AIDS-related illnesses.
Significantly, long-term follow-up of these trials did not show a prolonged benefit of AZT, but also did not indicate that the drug increased disease progression or mortality.
In more recent years, three-drug combination therapies have produced another 50 to 80 percent improvement in progression to AIDS and in survival when compared with two-drug regimens in clinical trials.