Send response to journal:
Re: Re: HIV EM and purification

In the hypothetical example Dr. Bennet gives of a patient with an HIV viral load of 1,000,000 per ml would this viral load be able to be confirmed by electron microscopy? One of the arguments against HIV causality of anything by Dr. DeHarven, now retired, but formerly an retroviral electron microscopist at Sloan Kettering, is that viral loads obtained indirectly by genetic amplification from patients' blood samples are not confirmed by gold standards of counting: electron microscopy and virus culture. Irrespective of the "load," nothing --from the blood sample -- can be detected by electron microscopy. This inability to see and count viruses in blood by e.m. mirrors Dr. Duesberg's original argument that even in the sickest AIDS patients (with the ostensibly highest viral load) the number of what he called HIV particles found by culture was so small that it would be biologically implausible in the extreme for it to cause any illness at that concentration.

Would Doctor Bennet comment?

Competing interests: None declared