Most Experts Suggest 90% of African Adult HIV is from heterosexual transmission, Gisselquist 30%

5 April 2003

Tony Floyd,
Medical Student
Newcastle University, Newcastle Australia

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Re: Most Experts Suggest 90% of African Adult HIV is from heterosexual transmission, Gisselquist 30%

I was (perhaps naively) hoping that alternative AIDS arguments on this page might stand up to scrutiny a little better than they have amongst the responses to David Spurgeon's article. Providing links to journal articles which were falsely implicated as supporting revolutionary ideas about AIDS has been met with either silence or a change of topic by those who have posted the misinformation.

The pattern is very much continuing here.

Work by David Gisselquist has been cited in support of alternative AIDS arguments. Gisselquist and others have most certainly published work suggesting that iatrogenic mechanisms of HIV transmission have been underestimated. Please explain (as I have asked already) where there is evidence that "According to Gisselquist and his colleagues HIV is not transmitted by ‘sex’ "(1)

In addition to the links to Gisselquist articles above which entirely disprove such claims, he has recently published an article about Heterosexual transmission of HIV(2):

--- "For more than a decade, most experts have assumed that more than 90% of HIV in African adults results from heterosexual transmission. In this exercise, we show how data from studies of risk factors for HIV can be used to estimate the proportion from sexual transmission, and we present our estimates. Calculating two ways from available data, our two point estimates - we do not estimate confidence intervals - are that 25-29% of HIV incidence in African women and 30-35% in men is attributable to sexual transmission" ---

The fact that 'most experts' claim it is 90%, and that Gisselquist thinks it approximately 30%, leads one to ask why he has been cited to support claims that HIV isn't sexually transmitted?

References:

(1) Papadopulos-Eleopulos. Low rates of heterosexual transmission and the HIV theory of AIDS. BMJ Rapid Response 24 March 2003

(2) Gisselquist D, Potterat JJ. Heterosexual transmission of HIV in Africa: an empiric estimate. Int J STD AIDS. 2003 Mar;14(3):162-73. PMID: 12665438 [Abstract]

Competing interests: None declared