HIV Skepticism Gets A Day in Court Down Under

In an Australian criminal appeal involving a man charged with knowingly spreading HIV by having unprotected sex, the question of whether it is scientifically proven that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease caused by HIV is being aired in court, including testimony from a group of organized HIV skeptics the Perth Group and by Dr. Robert Gallo, the American scientist credited with discovering the virus and its AIDS connection.

See the front page of the "AIDS alternatives" site Alive and Well, the "News and Updates" section, for Austrialian press coverage of the trial and links to Gallo's testimony. The site editors find that testimony damning, as their excerpts from it has him appear to claim that the evidence he gathered when first annoucing HIV had been proven to be the cause of AIDS–40 percent of AIDS patients in his study found with the virus–does not in fact do so.

UPDATE: The larger context of the Gallo testimony, unquoted on Alive and Well's page, shows that what they have him appearing to claim is not exactly what he was trying to claim on the stand. Gallo says "I think we isolated in almost every patient with AIDS that we tried…we didn't get negative results in 70 other people. You may be including the normal controls where it wasn't isolated." Please note: I have not myself read Gallo's original 1986 Nature paper under discussion in writing this blog post.