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NUTRITIONAL ASPECT OF AIDS

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Sir,

Give almost any bedridden AIDS patient a 400-600mcg daily supplement of selenium and within one week that person will be out of bed, usually with plenty of energy and a healthy appetite. Dr David Ho, the developer of protease inhibitor drugs, destroyed the accepted paradigm of how HIV causes AIDS in his keynote address to the International AIDS Society’s First Scientific Conference on AIDS in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2001.


Dr Ho explained; “It is impossible that HIV causes AIDS as most people believe, because HIV infects less than one per cent of CD4 cells. HIV cannot kill all the CD4 cells by infecting one per cent of them. Something else must be happening.”

Ho pointed out that CD4 cells live for only four days - except for rare memory T-cells. Yet most people in the field of AIDS still believe and teach the fallacy that HIV causes AIDS by killing CD4 cells. That is what they were taught, and what they still believe. They perpetuate a preliminary, oversimplified, premature theory proposed early in the HIV epidemic to attempt to explain this complex disease. However, no scientist has ever been able to fully elaborate the details of that early theory. Unfortunately, no authority has ever bothered to correct that mistaken hypothesis either.


Today the continuing belief in and propagation of that overly simplistic explanation does irreparable harm to the health of millions living with HIV/AIDS and costs governments billions of Dollars a year. It is incumbent on the scientific community to shift the scientific paradigm of how HIV causes AIDS to one that can explain all the phenomena related to HIV disease, not just some of them. If the theory of how HIV causes AIDS that most people continue to believe is not correct – what is the correct explanation?


HIV does not cause AIDS by killing CD4 cells. It causes it by preventing the production of new CD4 cells. Like a computer code, the HIV Env gene genetically encodes a selenium-containing protein that constitutes part of its protective envelop. The viral envelope is equivalent to a person’s skin. It protects viral RNA from the inter-cellular environment into which it will be released. Every time an HIV virus is produced it uses up an infinitesimal amount of the body’s limited resources of the essential trace element selenium. As HIV replication increases, selenium levels progressively decline. As selenium declines, CD4 falls in tandem.


Both CD4 and CD8 cells originate as naïve cells in the bone marrow. Millions of undifferentiated precursor cells migrate to the thymus daily to be processed and released into the blood stream. After naive cells arrive in the thymus they are processed. Some immunologists compare this to being educated in a university. Once these cells have been ‘educated’, they are tested for auto-reactivity to check if they attack proteins that contain that person’s DNA. If they do attack a person’s own proteins, those defective CD4 cells fail and are instructed to self-destruct through the process of programmed cell death - apoptosis. If this immune process is defective, some auto-reactive cells are released, resulting in auto-immune diseases like lupus.


lifespan


Since their lifespan is only four days, millions of new CD4 and CD8 cells must be produced daily. CD4 helper cells are often referred to as the generals of the immune system army. They direct various types of immune cells where to go, what to attack, and when to stop. CD8 suppressor cells help tamp down immune reactions, so activated immune responses remain under control. While immune functionality can be measured by CD4 count alone, a better measure of overall immune health is the CD4/CD8 ratio. Normally the immune system should have one to two CD4 cells for each CD8 cell. A fully healthy CD4/CD8 ratio is between 1.0 and 2.0. When the CD4/CD8 ratio falls below .20, that is an additional way to statistically define AIDS. The question is: what is the greatest factor influencing the balance between CD4 and CD8 cellproduction? The answer: the level of selenium in the body.
According to researchers, the thymus determines how many CD4 cells versus how many CD8 cells it produces based on the level of selenium in the body. If the selenium level is low, it produces more CD8 and fewer CD4. If the selenium level is high, it produces more CD4 and fewer CD8. The thymus is like an automobile assembly plant that produces two different models of cars depending on the demand of the marketplace. Low selenium levels send the immunological marketplace signals to produce more CD8 and fewer CD4 cells. Higher levels of selenium send the opposite signal. Like multipotential car chassis, naive precursor CD cells can be modeled either way to make CD4 or CD8, depending on which immune messenger signals selenium levels send. By gradually, and then more rapidly depleting selenium levels, HIV replication causes CD4 count to decline and CD8 to increase. Supplementing selenium back into the body reverses this.
ARVs increase CD4 count by stopping the viral depletion of selenium, allowing selenium levels to gradually rise again and CD4s to rebound. Adding selenium supplements causes CD4 cells to rise much faster. This scientific-based analysis clearly shows how HIV causes AIDS. The outmoded, incorrect explanation that HIV causes the disease by killing CD4 cells fails to explain several key observed phenomena. Any scientific theory that does not successfully incorporate all the observed phenomena cannot possibly be correct. Although the virus does kill a few CD4 cells, the correct explanation of how HIV causes AIDS is by preventing the adequate production of new CD4s.
Although good overall nutrition is important in countering the effects of any disease, HIV causes a specific nutritional deficiency that must be corrected. Indeed, HIV may be understood as a disease of nutritional deficiency caused by a virus – acquired immune deficiency of selenium – AIDS. That deficiency causes a devastating imbalance between CD4 and CD8 cell production. Like vitamin-C for scurvy, it is critical to remedy this nutritional deficiency by supplementing selenium. Using multivitamin or multivitamin-mineral tablets does not address this deficiency since the selenium content in such supplements is far too low and they risk providing patients too much iron, zinc and vitamin A; all of which are contraindicated in HIV. The proper dose of selenium is 200mcg when the CD4 count is above 400; 400mcg when CD4 is between 100 and 400; and 600mcg daily when CD4 falls below 100 or there are opportunistic infections. If a patient faces an immediate life-threatening complication like encephalitis, meningitis or pneumonia, 1mg of selenium can be used safely. This compares to the 2.0mg daily selenium supplement recommended for the Ebola virus (EVD). Only affordable selenium supplements can provide this required amount. Diet alone cannot.
Application
Application of these proven scientific facts through enlightened health policy would improve the health of those living with HIV, reduce hospitalisations and deaths. This would save international agencies and governments enormous financial resources that could be used to improve care. The question is, why is UNAIDS failing to act based on this long-established scientific knowledge? What is their alternative motive?
In a 2016 article in the journal AIDS, the Rwandan Ministry of Health showed that just 200mcg of selenium per day could slow HIV progression in those not yet on ARVs by 43.8 per cent. Two tablets daily (400mcg) should slow progression by up to 60 per cent. Application of this knowledge would improve the health of millions who still do not receive treatment as soon as they test positive as recommended in the ‘test and treat’ approach. Adding selenium to first-line treatment should extend the use of first-line therapy and greatly improve health. This applies to second-line therapy as well. By themselves, ARVs have no direct effect on CD4 cell production. They merely allow the body to recover from its immune deficiency. Adding selenium is like putting icing on the cake of HAART therapy. It significantly improves treatment outcomes and cuts costs.
It remains inexplicable why national and international health authorities continue to fail to apply proven science in the worldwide fight against HIV. This historic failure is inexcusable. It has contributed to the ill health and premature death of millions of people with AIDS worldwide. This ignorance and failure by health authorities to act based on scientific evidence to benefit people with HIV needs to end now.

Howard Armistead

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