Role of Legal and Illegal Drug Use
Duesberg argues that there is a statistical correlation between trends in recreational drug use and trends in AIDS cases. He argues that the epidemic of AIDS cases in the 1980s corresponds to a supposed epidemic of recreational drug use in the United States and Europe during the same time frame.
These claims are not supported by epidemiologic data. The average yearly increase in opioid-related deaths from 1990-2002 was nearly three times the yearly increase from 1979–1990, with the greatest increase in 2000-2002, yet AIDS cases and deaths fell dramatically during the mid-to-late-1990s. Duesberg's claim that recreational drug use, rather than HIV, was the cause of AIDS has been specifically examined and found to be false. Cohort studies have found that only HIV-positive drug users develop opportunistic infections; HIV-negative drug users do not develop such infections, indicating that HIV rather than drug use is the cause of AIDS.
Duesberg has also argued that nitrite inhalants were the cause of the epidemic of Kaposi sarcoma (KS) in gay men. However, this argument has been described as an example of the fallacy of a statistical confounding effect; it is now known that a herpesvirus, potentiated by HIV, is responsible for AIDS-associated KS.
Moreover, in addition to recreational drugs, Duesberg argues that anti-HIV drugs such as zidovudine (AZT) can cause AIDS. Duesberg's claim that antiviral medication causes AIDS is regarded as disproven by the scientific community. Placebo-controlled studies have found that AZT as a single agent produces modest and short-lived improvements in survival and delays the development of opportunistic infections; it certainly did not cause AIDS, which develops in both treated and untreated study patients. With the subsequent development of protease inhibitors and highly active antiretroviral therapy, numerous studies have documented the fact that anti-HIV drugs prevent the development of AIDS and substantially prolong survival, further disproving the claim that these drugs "cause" AIDS.
Read more about this topic: Duesberg Hypothesis
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