Digital AZT: Is The Public Health System AIDS Cure The Best Approach To Secure The Internet From Malicious Software?

I was recently struck by the title of a short post pointing to what appeared to be security article entitled "A Public Health Approach to Preventing Malware Propagation" published by Technology Review.

Photo credit: Nick Winchester

The article is in fact only a short pointer to the master thesis for Kim Zelonis, which is originally entitled AVOIDING THE CYBER PANDEMIC: A Public Health Approach to Preventing Malware Propagation.
(PDF - 700 KB)

The thesis supported in the paper is the one supporting the idea that apparent analogies between computer malware and human viruses are not just superficial and that good lessons could be learned from public health sector experience in combating AIDS.

While the Technology Review editor praises Zelonis for considering such novel approaches to malware, I find both of them too complacent with the generic stream of information which has been handed down to the public on this topic for years without further critical evaluation.

Wanting to carry over the disastrous experiences of the public health system in dealing with AIDS is certainly not due to a young scholar wanting to conspire against something but rather the results of the extended and very persistent misinformation strategy and propaganda enacted over the years by the mainstream news channels.

In good faith, we are reporting and promoting solutions that serve not the good of who is in pain.

If you are skeptical about such views, as you should be, just scratch a bit under the surface and look at some of the references available to anyone seeking to find.

What I did, was to send out the URL of Zelonis' thesis to a few contacts who scout and research continuously this medical, pharmaceutical and health-related fields while collecting and evaluating mainstream and counter-information sources.

Here is some of the feedback I have received:

"Dear Robin,

thank you for sending me the link to this most interesting if deeply flawed paper about a public health approach to the internet security issues.

The author assumes as a given some highly debatable points:

1) HIV is the cause of Aids

2) HIV is spread by sexual interaction

3) Programs to promote the use of condoms and other advice on limiting sexual contact have been successful in controlling AIDS.

Consequently, the recommendations made are going in a highly questionable direction, that of increasing virus awareness in individual users, and of limiting potentially "infective" contact on the internet.

I would think it useful to de-bunk this type of approach to cyber security because all we will end up having is the current trend of a controlled society extended to the internet, with potentially very negative consequences.

Some people I know have travelled a similar road and have come essentially to the same conclusion. If anyone wants to see a real-life example of the matrix - just look at the operation called HIV-AIDS.

As a first comment, I would say that the basic contentions on the HIV/AIDS "epidemic" can be shown at least to be in serious doubt - and by no means as cut and dry as the author of the above master's thesis would like to make it appear.

Here is some resource material where you can go to see and verify how solid are the foundations on which your beliefs about HIV/AIDS are built on:

• AIDS: Scientific or Viral Catastrophe? - by Neville Hodgkinson
  shows that the virus hypothesis in AIDS is seriously flawed.
• The "HIV Test" is shown to have no scientific validity further undermining the HIV scenario.
• Also, Liam Scheff has written a recent piece that shows tests are far from being objectively used. The results are interpreted in different ways, depending on what "risk group" you are part of. (The Hidden Face of HIV...)

A few more general comments:

One statement that caught my eye in the paper as eminently challengeable was that the author calls "existing solutions minimally effective".

Now that depends very much on the view you are taking.

I would submit that the efforts to limit malware have been effective in that people have been able to continue use of the internet with minimal problems (certainly minimal in comparison with the "cure" advocated by the author, which might lead to much more incisive limitations of internet use).

I would also like to add that, if we want to use a biological analogy, we should liken the internet to (the human) organism and strive to build an immune system for the internet.

Rather than trying to mimic the (largely ineffective) public health intervention measures of a deeply flawed medical paradigm, which has given us steadily rising disease rates by insistence on largely ineffective pharmaceutical type intervention, we should take our cues from the human body, which is arguably an almost perfect organism, a time tested design that has survived through the ages.

In a healthy human organism, we have a symbiotic relationship with a multitude of microbial life that is normally supportive of the organism's overall function.

Deviating from conventional medical wisdom, some argue that even those microbes we associate with disease are part and parcel of the functioning of the organism, that "illness" is a normal process.

What counts is that the body, without a lot of external intervention, normally overcomes those "disease" processes and is more resistant thereafter.

I would in fact describe the immune system as that part of the human organism that regulates our interaction with the microbial inhabitants of the system. It
activates when there is a threat of disequilibrium, bringing the relative population of whatever microbe is "out of hand" back to normal levels.

The same would be true for cyberspace.

We have hardware and software mediating information exchange and whether we like it or not, ALL code is part of the software of the system. As we overcome malware misadventures, the internet as such tends to become more and more resistant.

An important question to keep asking is: how can we better organize our
response capability?

Though I can't answer myself that one, I suggest that we explore analogous scenarios in a perfectly functioning organism that we could use.

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Some Worthy References:

Wm. C. Douglass, "WHO killed Africa"

"AIDS and the HIV Myth"

Alan Cantwell's "AIDS and the Doctors of Death"

The Gulf Bio War
How a New AIDS-like Plague Threatens Our Armed Forces

Peter Duesberg's Ph.D. articles

John Lauriston: Poison By Prescription

Root-Bernstein's book, "Rethinking AIDS."

Len Horowitz: AIDS, Ebola, Vaccines

"What's so frustrating is that a large number of people seem to be giving credence to suggestions that African AIDS was the result of an insane US conspiracy to depopulate the continent.

That "the virus" was originally manufactured in a US bio-weapons laboratory, and then deliberately introduced into African populations as part of vaccination programs...

As before, I think that there IS a "conspiracy."

But it is a "conspiracy" born of ignorance and suspicion.

A true folie a deux: massive ignorance about "AIDS" in Africa (even forgetting about HTLVIII - much of the wasting and so-called "AIDS" in Africa is simply dysentery and de-hydration, malnutrition and classical tropical diseases)
in combination with paranoic conspiracies about secret CIA/US Military
bioweapons programs and U.N.-sponsored vaccinations...

The whole mad, unbearably sad tale, has come full circle."

A few more thoughts and statements from notable people who have researched this topic:

"It's not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence... there should be scientific documents which... demonstrate that fact... There are no such documents."
Dr Kary Mullis Nobel Laureate

"If you think a virus is the cause of AIDS, do a control without it....it hasn't been done. The epidemiology of AIDS is a pile of anecdotal stories, selected to fit the virus/AIDS hypothesis..."
Peter Duesberg Member, National Academy of Sciences

"Nobody wants to look at the facts...I've sent countless letters to medical journals...they simply ignore them. The fact is, this whole heterosexual AIDS thing is a hoax."
Prof Gordon Stewart Public Health University of Glasgow

"The cause of AIDS is multifactorial ; HIV is neither necessary nor sufficient."
Dr Lawrence Bradford biologist

"...AIDS is not a disease at all - it is a government program."
Tom Bethel Hoover Institute researcher

"Electron microscopy reveals retrovirus-like particles in 90% of enlarged lymph nodes from AIDS patients but the identical particles can be found in 90% of enlarged lymph nodes from patients who do not have AIDS and are not at risk from developing AIDS. If the particles seen...in AIDS patients are, as the AIDS experts assure, HIV, what are the particles seen in patients..who are not at risk..."
Dr Valendar Turner, Australian Broadcasting program 1994

"A major problem with the new AIDS definition is that it ignores the man-made environmental causes of immune suppression. Exposure to toxins, alcoholism, heavy drug use or heavy antibiotic use all can cause onset of the list of 'diseases' indicative of AIDS."
Los Angeles Weekly Dec 18 1987

"Regarding the only type of HIV antibody test routinely used in the UK since 1992, called an ELISA, manufacturers, Abbott Laboratories, say : 'ELISA testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS..'." Roche Diagnostics..likewise say of their genetic 'HIV testing kits' : "The Amplicor HIV Monitor test is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection"
Continuum Magazine leaflet Dec 1998

"The techniques of the HIV test have not been standardised and the magnitude and the consequences of inter-laboratory variations have not been measured.
Its results require interpretation and the criteria for this interpretation vary, not only from lab to lab, but from month to month."
New England Journal of Medicine 317:238-241

"Positive tests do not prove AIDS or pre-AIDS disease status nor that these diseases will be acquired."
Manufacturers of Western Blot (HIV) test kit

"A study last month, by Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, found that HIV tests can be very inaccurate indeed. For groups at very low risk - people who don't use IV drugs or have sex with gay or bi-sexual men - 9 in 10 positive findings are called false positives, indicating infection where none exists."
US News and World Report Nov 23 1994

"HIV tests are notoriously unreliable in Africa. A 1994 study, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, concluded that HIV tests were useless in central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70% false positive."
Sacramento Bee October 30 1994

Above quotes thanks to Harmonc Ireland - Patrick Rattigan ND

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Edited with contributions from Sepp Hasslberger and Doug Aerie