Grouppe Kurosawa: HIV - The Day AIDS Ceased to be Fatal (print)

The Day AIDS Ceased to be Fatal

Dr. Abigail Zuger, a hospital physician working as a science writer wrote the most important AIDS article ever published. This article, aptly called A Deadly Masquerade, was published in Discover Magazine in June, 1994. It is available on the Net in the Discover.com web site archives. The article tells the story of a 26-year-old woman, Beatrice Kaye who was days away from dying of AIDS. In the previous four years, she had been in and out of the hospital and survived three major AIDS-related pneumonias and brain infections. She was now hospitalized for the last time and was psychologically preparing herself for death. As Dr. Zuger wrote, “she was preparing to die, but she was conceding defeat to the wrong enemy”. Ms. Kaye didn’t die. She actually checked out of the hospital two days later and returned home to her kids. One month later, she had gained twenty-five pounds and was feeling fine. Six months later she was back at work. Impossible? Nothing is impossible.

When I have repeated this story to colleagues, their first reaction is to claim that Dr. Zuger misdiagnosed the woman’s disease. This is hardly the case. The reality is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to label stories like this as a mistake, a fraud or a Miracle. It is none of the above. Discovery is a matter of scientific knowledge, a broad educational perspective, and an open mind. Dr. Zuger and her colleagues acted on their instincts. They noticed that Ms. Kaye had all the symptoms of adrenal insufficiency, or Addison’s disease. These symptoms include anorexia, weakness, diarrhea, abdominal pain, weight loss and extreme susceptibility to pathogenic microorganisms. They ordered a blood test to determine the level of cortisol (hydrocortisone) in her blood. Fortunately, before the test results came back from the lab, they gave her oral glucosteroid pills, probably prednisolone, just in case. This did the trick. Ms Kaye’s appetite returned, and the other symptoms rapidly disappeared. She went home a few days later. Interestingly, the blood tests found a normal level of cortisol in her blood. So, technically, she did not have Addison’s disease after all. What was wrong with Ms. Kaye? In 1994, we did not know enough about the HIV virus and what it did to the body. We had questions, thousands of them, but very few answers. In 2001, we know why prednisolone reversed the course of this woman’s death spiral. Now, we need to act on this knowledge.

The HIV virus has many unique features. The scientific community has never seen anything like it. Only one viral particle out of 60,000 is actually infectious, yet the progression of the disease is highly correlated with the number of viral particles in the blood. The viral particles, infectious or not, induce a long slow process of shock in the body. The proteins contained within the viral particles are able to induce a state of increasingly severe glucosteroid resistance in most of the cells of the body. This disrupts the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from the intestines, maintain blood pressure, maintain body mass and appetite, or fight infection. Normally, shock would be considered an acute disorder that is treated with high concentrations of synthetic glucosteroids, such as prednisolone. Shock can be caused by many different factors, but every one of these factors has in common the release of large amounts of pro-inflammatory immune hormones into the blood. Excessive amounts of pro-inflammatory immune hormones cause fatal vascular collapse, i.e. the blood pressure becomes too low to sustain life. Glucosteroids, anti-inflammatory hormones by definition, inhibit the synthesis and release of these pro-inflammatory hormones. If the shock is too severe, the body becomes resistant to the glucosteroids and death occurs rapidly. The nature of this resistance is known. Interestingly, this is the same glucosteroid resistance that is slowly induced in the body over a period of 10 or more years by the HIV virus. But there is one difference. The HIV stimulated shock is cumulative—not abrupt as with sepsis (severe blood infections). This glucosteroid resistance can, and dramatically will, be reversed by synthetic glucosteroids.

The question that begs answering is whether glucosteroids, such as prednisolone, can cure AIDS? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Since 1994, numerous studies have been published showing that oral glucosteroids have dramatically reversed many of the symptoms of AIDS. Glucosteroids kill virally infected CD4 cells while increasing the production of new, non infected cells. Viral synthesis is not increased. Glucosteroids also abruptly stop the so-called programmed cell death of bystander CD4 cells that many scientists believe is the cause of HIV-mediated T lymphocyte depletion. Glucosteroids are immunosuppressive, so the immune response will not regenerate itself in the continued presence of synthetic glucosteroids. On the other hand, these same hormones will largely prevent the terminal phase of AIDS and the progression of the disease in general.

In 1996, I gave a talk to a group of AIDS physicians who were affiliated with the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. It was a late afternoon talk and most of the physicians were tired and hungry. I passed out copies of the Discover article and tried to interest them in treating their patients with glucosteroids. There was not much interest. Physicians are afraid of these steroids because they are immunosuppressive. Yet, this is exactly why they should be used. The pro-inflammatory hormones released by the HIV virus are literally driving the disease, i.e. they are stimulating infected cells to produce virus and causing inflammatory havoc in virtually every organ in the body. Potent anti-inflammatory hormones are exactly what the body needs in order to reverse the course of the disease. One physician, a woman, listened very intently to my talk. She admitted that she had given prednisolone to an AIDS patient for some ailment, and he stopped coming to her office for further treatments. She heard from his friends that he was off climbing mountains somewhere.

From 1996 to today, I have tried to interest physicians in treating advanced AIDS patients with synthetic glucosteroids. No one would listen. I joined an email group of AIDS physicians and scientists and posted essays about this subject. I wanted to get a dialogue going amongst these people, and hopefully get some clinical trials going in community settings. The silence was deafening. I couldn’t get one physician or scientist to respond to my emails. Apparently, the general consensus is that treating advanced AIDS patients (they don’t have to be advanced) with glucosteroids is a simplistic idea. Einstein once said that the best ideas are the simple ones. At least in this case, I believe he was right.

A few comments about the current crop of anti-HIV protease inhibitors are in order. The protease inhibitors that have been developed to control the HIV infection do not work as designed. They may very well inhibit the viral protease, but this is irrelevant, as only one virus in 60,000 is infectious anyway. These inhibitors are actually inhibiting the activity of a group of cellular enzymes collectively called proteasomes. When you inhibit these enzymes, the synthesis of the HIV virus and pro-inflammatory hormones largely cease. Glucosteroid resistance disappears, and virally infected cells spontaneously die. Synthetic glucosteroids, coupled with some simple compounds that can be purchased in health food stores, will do the same thing at a fraction of the cost of protease inhibitors. The Third World cannot afford protease inhibitors, but they can afford the alternative.

My colleagues and I are designing a web site that will discuss all these ideas and more. All the information will be in the public domain and non-patented. It should be ready in February. We want to develop an informational web site that can scientifically substantiate all the ideas put forth in this document. The web site will also contain a detail analysis of current HIV vaccines and why they will not work. We have withdrawn all our own HIV vaccine patent applications and will post them to the site as public information. We have a different perspective on how HIV vaccines should be constructed and administered. Most importantly, we want the web site to be an open forum for physicians and scientists to talk to one another and the world, for that matter, in an unedited environment. We also want physicians to be able to post anecdotal evidence to the site concerning their use of synthetic glucosteroids as a treatment for AIDS. We want successful treatment protocols posted for the world to evaluate. If these steroids, and inexpensive enhancers of steroid binding, work, as we believe, the word will spread internationally like a prairie fire. The world will die of AIDS unless we change our perspective on this disease and stop looking for the cure where the light is better. Glucosteroids are not a cure for AIDS, but they are one hell of a treatment and that isn’t too bad.

AIDS is a puzzle of biblical proportions. Scientists of all nationalities have worked tirelessly to understand a small piece of the puzzle and to submit the information via publication for scientific scrutiny. In a perfect world, this would be enough. The pieces would fit and we would understand the problem and how to solve it. AIDS, like cancer, is complex. There have been tens of thousands of scientific studies done on the HIV viruses—too many for anyone to assimilate completely. As a consequence, we are left with tens of thousands of individual puzzle pieces, piled high and deep, without much idea of how they are supposed to fit together. Scientists always try to see the Big Picture, but it isn’t always possible. Sometimes we have to settle for the Little Picture, and that is what we are proposing in this document. We, at Grouppe Kurosawa and ScorpionPharma, believe we, the international scientific and medical communities, have finally reached the point where enough pieces of the puzzle fit to understand an important part of the disease. We believe this important part of the puzzle, the Little Picture, clearly shows that people who succumb of AIDS die of infection, certainly, but only when the infection is imposed on a body that cannot respond to the natural anti-inflammatory hormone cortisol and is therefore too weak to defend itself. We can’t rid the body of the HIV virus, yet, but we can stop the progression of the disease. And we will.

God Bless Dr. Zuger, and her colleagues, God Bless Beatrice Kaye and God Bless the Internet. Some stories are not too good to be true.