More pseudoscholarship from the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology

WELL, IT LOOKS LIKE HIGHLY COMPETENT, Even Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Marco Ruggiero of the University of Florence, (whose academic achievements are celebrated here) has scored another coup in his ongoing campaign to embarrass his university and draw the contempt of the few people who can be bothered watching his self-promoting antics and those of his fellow clowns from Rethinking AIDS.

Apparently his and coauthor Henry Bauer's brilliant scheme to secure fame and fortune through marketing  Mad Marco's Magic Yoghurt Cure For AIDS over the internet has fallen through, despite the free advertising to the target demographic provided by Leading Scientific Discussion Forum Questioning AIDS. So they've gone back to writing inept epidemiology papers with their friends Duesberg, Rasnick, Fiala and the other denialists, and trying to get them published.

Their latest effort is called  AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic - not even in Africa.

To get it into print Ruggiero has had to call in yet another favor from his dear and close friend Paolo Romagnoli, editor of the... umm... prestigious Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology - lauded by Nature news editor Brian Owens on Twitter as "a journal you've never heard of".

Romagnoli has also put his hand up to confess that he was one of the two "peer reviewers" who okayed this drivel for publication. Unfortunately that marks him as as clueless as the authors.

This is now the third AIDS denialist pseudo-epidemiology paper published by Romagnoli's IJAE in the past couple of years, or fourth if you include a recently published conference abstract by Ruggiero et al that probably could be classified as "denialist" if it were remotely intelligible. The other two papers are discussed here.

As more than one commentator has observed, Romagnoli seems to be trying to convert his journal from a respectable but somewhat obscure anatomy and embryology publication into the Italian Journal of Amateur Epidemiology - a vanity journal for his personal friends in the AIDS denialist movement to gain access to coveted NIH library listing despite the fact that they are - well there's no kind way of saying this - completely nuts.

That seems to be Henry Bauer's idea, anyway:

THE SIX SENIOR AUTHORS OF THE PAPER - Duesberg, Rasnick, Bauer, Koehnlein, Fiala and Ruggiero - comprise about half the board members of Rethinking AIDS. The other three are recent graduates who have worked under Duesberg and Ruggiero.To get an idea of just how seriously whacked out the "Board of Rethinking AIDS" really is, have a look at the homicidally negligent Patient Information Leaflet they publish and distribute to people with HIV/AIDS, or who are at risk:

"AIDS doctors accidentally killed an estimated 300,000 people during the AIDS hysteria years of 1987-1997 (by prescribing heavy doses of AZT or similar drugs). It was a mass iatrogenic (doctor caused) massacre, claiming the lives of Arthur Ashe, Rudolf Nureyev, Keith Haring, Kimberley Bergalis, Freddie Mercury and many others.

“They were healthy until convinced to take the medicines. This danger is still with us. Modern AIDS drugs are less toxic, but still life threatening, just not as quickly. Today, 2009, those taking the modern-day ARV therapy are dying at an average age of 45.”

etc...

Or check out coauthor Dr David Rasnick's medical "advice" about HIV testing, originally posted on the Rethinking AIDS channel on Youtube:

"People ask me all the time. I don't volunteer - I only answer if they ask. I say: Don't take the test. If unfortunately you take the test don't find out what the result is. If you come back positive I say forget it. If you can't forget it, the test is so unstable keep taking it until you get a negative one and then stop."

In reality, the IJAE paper's just a rehash of the woeful Out of Touch With South African AIDS fiasco, a work so inept that even the publishers of Medical Hypotheses rejected it. And your paper has to be pretty bad if even Med Hype refuses to accept your payment to print it.

Yep, it's a stinker.

No serious epidemiologist or HIV/AIDS scientist or clinician would consider either the original paper or its latest incarnation even remotely credible, but that's not the point of it. The paper wasn't written and published for a scientific readership: rather the idea is to provide a veneer of credibility for the benefit of their unsophisticated target audience - to be able to say "Look! There really is a genuine scientific controversy here about whether HIV causes AIDS!" And when people with HIV/AIDS get sucked into the Rethinking AIDS propaganda, the consequences are often devastating.

While Romagnoli and his University of Florence might like to pretend to themselves that they are simply providing a platform for genuine and sincere scientific debate about an unresolved issue, in reality they are merely supporting a cynical propaganda campaign targeted at those people who are least able to critically examine the claims of the AIDS denialists, and who can be most harmed by their misinformation. Henry Bauer makes the strategy of Rethinking AIDS perfectly clear:

"At any rate, AIDStruthers [ie the scientific mainstream] are not the audience to be courted. Their arguments must be countered with answers directed to the media and the general public in terms that are understandable by and clearly convincing for unengaged observers. That means the points cannot be too technical."

And when generally credible scientific media outlets like Nature News and Comment provide publicity - even negative publicity - they are playing into the Rethinking AIDS strategy, which is to try to convince their target audience that there is a legitimate scientific controversy going on.  Especially when they trumpet a headline like "Paper refuting HIV–AIDS link secures publication: Work by infamous AIDS contrarian passes peer review" without making any attempt to explain the background to the paper's publication. (A day or two later someone at Nature changed "refuting" to "denying", but this makes little difference).

Because as former "public relations chairperson" of Rethinking AIDS Elizabeth Ely gloats on RA's facebook page:

SNOUT WON'T BORE HIS READERS with a blow by blow dissection thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational reading of the whole paper, but here's a small sample of the Burning Stupid that Romagnoli thought worth publishing. As Actual Epidemiologist Max Essex remarked, when faced with bilge like this "it's hard to respond in an intelligent way". Coauthor on the paper Christian Fiala, of course, excitedly interprets this as meaning "there is no argument against what we have presented", and in a way that's true - after all as Thomas Jefferson once said, "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."

Fiala, of course, is the guy who gained recent notoriety for announcing on the fundamentalist christian website WingNut Daily that he not only denies that HIV causes AIDS but also that HPV causes cervical cancer.

The paper begins with the proposition that:

"The germ theory of disease predicts that a new (relative to a population) pathogenic virus or microbe causes an exponentially spreading epidemic of new microbe-specific illnesses and deaths within weeks to months of the arrival of the new pathogen (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010)." [italics added]

The online encyclopaedia entry they cite says nothing of the kind, no doubt because Duesenggiero's statement is nonsense. But no matter, they use this "citation" to conclude that that the AIDS epidemic cannot have been caused by a virus, because:

"A new viral epidemic would have risen and declined exponentially within weeks or months after its discovery in 1984." [italics added]

Pardon?

Next the authors express surprise that "the WHO/UNAIDS does not list any numbers
on 'Reported HIV cases' and 'Reported AIDS cases'" in South Africa, and just in case you don't believe them, they include an image of the blank data boxes.

Golly gee. Could that have anything to do with the fact that neither HIV infection nor AIDS are notifiable conditions in that country?

Then we come to the main thrust of Duesenggiero's argument: that because the estimated populations of various African countries have continued to increase during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, there can't possibly have been significant HIV/AIDS mortality.

That's essentially it.

No, really. It's that dumb.

These amateur epidemiologists have apparently never considered the impact of high birth rates, migrations, and other factors on total population estimates.

 

For example, they state:

Unexpectedly we found that the population of South Africa had increased by 3 million from 2000 to 2005, based on concordant statistics from South Africa and the US Census Bureau.

Duesenggiero et al appear to be unaware that the Statistics South Africa and US Census Bureau population figures they are citing are not head counts, but estimates that included explicit modelling of the impact of HIV/AIDS on mortality.

Source: Statistics South Africa: Mid-year population estimates, South Africa 2005

Then they tell us that:

In all countries where testing was introduced the prevalence of HIV-antibodies was soon found to be steady as it would be expected if HIV were a long-established endemic retrovirus (Duesberg, 1996; Duesberg, 1992; Duesberg et al., 2003).

This is an unbelievably ignorant claim. It is so wrong you can only wonder what morons provided the three references used to support it. And - you guessed it - Duesberg mines this stupid factoid out of his own arse on all three occasions, despite the authors contradicting themselves only a couple of paragraphs earlier when they inform us that in South Africa:

anti-HIV antibodies were first detected in 0.7% of the population. This percentage then increased gradually (not exponentially!) over about 10 years until 2000 when it levelled off between 25 and 30%.

Hmm. Let me see. A forty-fold rise in seroprevalence between 1990 and 2005 is what Duesenggiero mean by steady? Furthermore, they also appear not to have noticed that the figures they are citing were not for the South African population as a whole, but rather were annual surveys of antenatal clinic attendees. In 2005, for example, the whole population (>2 years old) prevalence was estimated at 10.8%, not 30.2%

Then the authors wheel out the Bedrock Factoid of Denialist Pseudo-epidemiology, namely:

In the US, for example, 1 million have been HIV-antibody-positive since 1985 (Curran et al., 1985; Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, 1986; Duesberg et al., 2003; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007, 2008).

This is nonsense that has been refuted over and over again - for example see here - and yet they bring out their favorite poor dead horse for yet another flogging. Aside from the fact that they are seriously misrepresenting Curran et al's 1985 estimate (which was based on taking the 10,000 notified AIDS cases to 1985 and guessing what percentage of the total HIV positive population they represent) it is disingenuous if not dishonest to suggest that the CDC estimates a steady 1 million prevalence. The CDC's US HIV prevalence and incidence estimates over the course of the epidemic to 2006 are shown here:

Source: CDC Fact Sheet HIV in the United States, July 2010

And so on. You get the idea - it's unutterable crap, even if you disregard the nauseous arrogance of the authors sitting on their fat arses in Berkeley or Firenze or Blacksburg Virginia and telling African communities that have buried far too many of their young adults that - hey! never mind, these deaths never really happened. Have some of our yummy yoghurt!

Yet another FAIL for the University of Florence. Please report to the Unsatisfactory Academic Progress Committee.




Further Reading:
What do we know about AIDS deaths in South Africa?
Debunking the new Duesberg HIV/AIDS Denialist “paper” in IJAE
Fighting on after the war is over, HIV contrarian publishes yet another paper


UPDATE (1st February 2012):
Looks like there's TROUBLE AT' MILL with the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Amateur Epidemiology. 

Editor-in-chief Paolo Romagnoli tells us that the peer reviewers for Duesenggiero's silly essay "were chosen on the basis of 'scientific competence' and 'impartiality of judgement'". Given that he himself was one of the two "reviewers" he chose, it's nice to know he has such a high opinion of himself.

Unfortunately, it seems, not all the members of his editorial board share this view.