Chapter Fourteen
Sarah enjoyed a leisurely lunch at California Dreaming, just off I-85 on the way to Spartanburg. Their salads were fresh, the creamed spinach to-die-for, and those honey-glazed croissants simply too tempting to pass up.
She decided, since court had adjourned early, to take the scenic route and visit Gwen at the college on the way home. She was given a tour, met some of the students, and was glad to get a first-hand look at the work Gwen was doing. She even got a chiropractic adjustment at the Sherman Health Center, something she desperately needed, having been away from Bill almost two weeks.
Just as she’s parking her car at the Lake Bowen house, her cell phone rings.
“Hey, Peyton. What’s up?... I’m just getting home, but yes, I’ve got time. What do you need?... I don’t know how much help I can be on the phone. What class are you talking about?... When’s the Science Fair?... Peanut, why don’t you hang on for a minute, let me get to my computer, and I’m going to put you on speaker phone so I can type while we talk….”
Sarah dumps her briefcase on the bed, sits down at her desk, turns on the computer, and hits a button on her cell phone. “Peyton, you still there?”
“Yes, Mom,” says the speaker.
“While my computer boots up, tell me more about this Science Fair.”
“It’s for the whole county, not just my school, and I can get extra credit in class if I have an entry. But I want to do more than that. I want to win!”
Where does she get that competitive streak? Sarah wonders. Certainly not from me. I’ll blame Bill next time I talk to him, she thinks, chuckling to herself.
“Okay. Maybe I can help. What do you want your project to be?”
“Something about the HIV tests.”
Suddenly Sarah wasn’t laughing any more. “Peyton, this whole HIV thing… well, it’s very controversial. There are a lot of people who get very upset if you ask any questions about HIV.”
“I know, Mom, but…”
“Hear me out, Peanut. I don’t know how your science teacher feels about the subject, and if he doesn’t like your ideas, you could get a bad grade – not because there was anything wrong with your project, but simply because of the topic.”
“I don’t get a grade, Mom. This is strictly for extra credit.”
“That’s not my point, Peanut. The point is that some people… well, what I’m trying to say is that you don’t know how people are going to react, and you might get in trouble, or at least be very disappointed if you don’t win for reasons other than how good your project was.”
“But I thought science was supposed to be all about asking questions and finding the right answers. Why would I get in trouble if that’s all I’m doing?”
Sarah winces at the innocence and the truth that comes from the mouth of babes. “I can’t answer that question because I don’t know the answer myself. But HIV is a really hot topic, and if your project challenges the conventional wisdom… well, let’s just say that there might be repercussions you aren’t thinking about right now.”
“But Mom, isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Then why can’t I do it, too?”
Sarah leans back, unsure of what to say. She loves the fact that Peyton is a free thinker, and she wishes she had been more of one herself in her younger days. It might have made a difference, and Greg might still be alive.
On the other hand, there was no guarantee that Peyton wouldn’t encounter a lot of problems that might spill over into the rest of her school life. No telling what the principal might say, for example, much less the science teacher.
“Mom, I asked you why I can’t do what you’re doing.”
Sarah realizes that there really was no other choice. “Of course you can do what I’m doing. And I’ll be glad to help. What exactly do you want to do?”
“Well, I’m not really sure. Just something about HIV and the HIV tests. I thought you might have an idea.”
“And what do you want to prove about the HIV tests?”
“I don’t know. From what I hear you and Dad talking about at night, maybe something about why they’re so bad.”
Sarah couldn’t stop laughing for a minute. “Yes, you’re right, Peanut, they’re pretty bad. So let’s see….” Peyton stays quiet while Sarah thinks. What could an eighth-grader do to show how bad the HIV tests are? Finally, her eyes light up. “How long do you have to put this project together, Peanut?”
“About six weeks. Why?”
“I have an idea. Do you know that the people who think that HIV causes AIDS are saying that the HIV tests are specific for HIV?”
“What’s that mean, Mom?”
Sarah pauses to find the right words. “It means that they say the HIV tests only react on people who have the antibodies to HIV, and no one else, and that’s how we know who is HIV-Positive and who’s not.”
“Okay. So?”
“But what if the HIV test is positive for someone, or something, that doesn’t really have HIV – that actually can’t have HIV? What would that say about the test itself?”
“It would say that it wasn’t very… specific.”
“Right! So how would you like to do a project that shows how easy it is to have an HIV test come out Positive on someone, or something, that we know cannot possibly have HIV?”
“You keep saying, ‘someone or something,’ Mom. What do you mean?”
Sarah types “dogs test HIV-Positive” into her Yahoo! search bar. While the results are coming up, she says, “Peyton, I just heard testimony in court that some dogs, some goats, and some cows have all tested positive on an HIV test.”
“You’re kidding, Mom! Dogs?”
“Yes, dogs. Perfectly healthy dogs. Perfectly healthy, straight dogs who were not IV drug users or hemophiliacs.”
The joke is lost on Peyton. Sarah enjoys it anyway as she continues. “But the Centers for Disease Control have said that HIV – the Human Immunodeficiency Virus – cannot be found in animals. Yes, there it is.” Sarah reads from the website on her computer screen. “There was a study in 1990 that tested 144 dogs and 72 of them reacted with one or more of the HIV proteins on an HIV test. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that, and I’m quoting, ‘A human retrovirus, like HIV, requires a human host. So a human retrovirus cannot survive in other animals or insects.’”
“That’s from the CDC?”
These kids are so sharp today. I wouldn’t have known what the ‘CDC’ was at thirteen years old. “Yes. It’s in a letter from the CDC to the person who wrote this article. So what does that mean to you?”
“It means that the HIV tests cannot be testing just for HIV, if dogs who don’t have HIV can have a positive test result.”
“Exactly! So how would you like to do a science project, like this study, that tests, oh, maybe twenty dogs for HIV, and see what the results are?”
Peyton is excited at first, but then the questions start rolling in. “How will I get the dogs’ blood to test? And how will I get it tested?”
“You know our friend Gene, the veterinarian? I’ll bet he’ll be willing to help get the blood you need. And your Dad knows the man who owns Squaw Peak Laboratories, so I bet he can get the HIV tests for you. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Wow, Mom. That sounds great!”
Sarah’s cell phone beeps with another incoming call, but she doesn’t recognize the caller ID. “Peyton, let me take this call, and then you and I can talk again later about getting this project going, okay?”
“’kay, Mom. Bye. And thanks!”
Sarah quickly answers the other call. “Hello?”
“Is this Sarah Meadows?” It was a man’s voice coming through the speakerphone that was still on.
“Yes.”
“My name is Mac Houston. Am I interrupting your dinner?”
“No.” Sarah’s not sure about this call yet, and also realizes now that she’s hungry. She’s not s
ure she wants to spend any time with this guy. “If you’re selling something…”
Mac breaks in quickly. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ve seen the stories you’re writing in the Arizona Tribune about people who have tested HIV-Positive.”
“Yes,” now wondering whether she’s in for a tongue lashing, which she’s in no mood for tonight.
“I want to tell you my story. It won’t take long.”
“Are you HIV-Positive?” Sarah starts looking for her tape recorder, thinking this might be next Sunday’s HEALTH MATTERS column.
“No, I’m not.”
Sarah stops her search, not sure of anything any more. “Then why?…”
Mac interrupts again. “I had a girlfriend who was, but for a long time I thought anyone who tested HIV-Positive should be tattooed for life.”
That got Sarah’s attention. This guy might sound like a nut case, but his voice is calm and sincere; and he has piqued Sarah’s curiosity. She leans back in her chair. “I’m listening.”
“For about twenty years I’ve been involved in law enforcement training. As you can imagine, I developed quite a few very strong opinions and prejudices about various things over that time, especially involving crime and criminals. As I saw the situation with HIV unfolding in the late 1980’s, I was pretty angry about it. With my professionally-tuned contempt for all things evil, I decided that we needed to eliminate this plague that was going to wipe out humanity from our planet. If HIV was the cause of AIDS, and if HIV was identifiable in someone with a relatively simple and accurate blood test – as we were being told by our government – it seemed ludicrous to me not to be doing universal testing and implementing something like a tattoo system to identify HIV-Positives.”
This time it was Sarah’s turn to interrupt. “Hold on, please, Mr. Houston.”
“Mac.”
Gwen had just walked in the door. Sarah motions to her to stay quiet and come over and listen to this conversation on the speakerphone.
“Okay, Mac.” Sarah repeats what Mac had just said to bring Gwen up to speed. “Let me make sure I heard you correctly. You wanted everybody in the world tested for HIV, and if they were found to be HIV-Positive, you wanted them tattooed, like the Jews in Nazi Germany?”
Gwen looks at Sarah in disbelief, and Mac seems a little embarrassed to have it phrased that way. “Something like that, yes. But I wanted that tattoo placed in a very intimate location of the body, so that anyone could see it in the process of having sex with the person.”
Sarah takes a deep breath, trying to get the picture out of her mind of her brother tattooed with the letters “HIV.”
Mac keeps going. “I would have settled for an identification card, if that’s all we could get. But I thought it was weak and irresponsible to know that something was a ticking time bomb and not do what we could to cut the wires.”
“But you don’t believe that any more?” Sarah hopes she knows the answer.
Mac pauses before he answers. “About five years ago I was dating a young girl, twenty, twenty-one years old. We’d been seeing each other intimately for a few months when she called me one day and said she really needed to talk. I thought she was either pregnant, had a sexually transmitted disease, or she couldn’t live without me and wanted to get married right away. At that point, I had solutions to all three of those problems…”
Sarah and Gwen both chuckle quietly. Maybe this guy is a little wacko, but he’s honest and entertaining, and seems to really want to tell his story.
“…but I decided I better meet her in a public place, because if she ended up slitting her wrists or my throat, I wanted to be able to get medical treatment quickly.”
Sarah laughs out loud, and it took a lot for Gwen to not to join her. This obviously isn’t something Sarah could print in her column, but still, the story is captivating.
“So we met at a Barnes and Noble. She danced around the issue for quite a while, and I finally had to say, ‘Sonja, what’s going on? You’re going to have to tell me eventually; why not tell me now. Right now.’ She said she had been to the doctor and had tested positive for HIV.”
Sarah doesn’t say anything, so Mac keeps on going. “At that point, the silence was deafening. She was devastated. She had already told her friends and her family. The doctor had told her that since she was young, strong, and healthy, she should immediately start taking a strict combo-therapy of HIV medications, including AZT. He told her he thought she could beat this thing if she would take the drugs.”
Like any good reporter, Sarah is anxious for more details. “Mac, had Sonja ever been tested for HIV before this?”
“No, she hadn’t.”
“Why did she get tested, then?”
“I don’t know for sure. The only thing I know is that Sonja was a pretty responsible girl, and getting tested for HIV was the responsible thing to do in those days. It was probably just routine.”
“Was she part of a high-risk group for AIDS?”
“Well, she was a woman, which automatically puts her in a very low-risk category for AIDS, since less than 20% of all AIDS victims are female.”
“But was she an IV drug user, or a hemophiliac?”
Sarah could almost feel Mac shaking his head. “No. Neither. I knew she had been a pretty wild party girl prior to meeting me, but no heavy drugs that I knew about. Just the light recreational stuff, which of course she never did around me. It’s true that she had been somewhat promiscuous prior to our relationship, but that doesn’t put someone in a high-risk group, now, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sarah agreed. “So there was no obvious reason why she might have tested HIV-Positive, and you don’t know how long she had been Positive, do you?”
“No. Frankly, I don’t know enough about her to know whether she had anything that might have triggered a false positive reaction, like a flu shot or a tetanus shot, or anything like that.”
Both Mac and Sarah pause. Mac was waiting for Sarah’s next question, but Sarah was done for the minute. All she could think or say was, “I’ll bet you were really upset with her.”
“Actually, no. She thought I would hate her, or be angry. But I wasn’t. It’s not like she knew she was HIV-Positive and didn’t tell me. She didn’t know, and how could I blame her for that?”
“So what did you do?”
“I admitted that I really didn’t know much about it, even though I had formed some strong opinions. But that was when it had to do with other people, not me. Now it had touched my life directly, and I wanted more information – fast, before jumping to any conclusions. There was a lot I wanted to learn, that I thought we should learn about HIV, especially if it had the potential to infect me or take my life. Fortunately, we were in a bookstore, so I suggested we go look and see what we could find.”
Mac stopped, as if wanting to see if Sarah was still there and still with him. She was.
“What did you find?”
“I found a book called Inventing the AIDS Virus, by Dr. Peter Duesberg. I thought, now there’s an interesting title. The other books around it were doom and despair books, like How To Die With Dignity, or How to Manage Your Process of Sloughing Off This Mortal Coil… stuff like that I was not the least bit interested in. I wanted to know what the science said about HIV and AIDS, and I read the back cover of Duesberg’s book and knew that I had found what I was looking for.”
“Why?”
“Because I could tell from the comments from a Nobel Laureate and other prominent scientists that Duesberg was no alarmist, or conspiracy theorist, or part of some fringe element. His bio on the inside cover said he was a pioneer in retrovirus research and had discovered the first cancer gene, and had been given an Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health. Besides, leafing through it I could see that it was a very thick and very technical book with lots of references that I could check out. That’s exactly what I wanted. So I bought it, and sat down and read it cover to cover in a couple days.”
“Did Sonja read it with you?”
“No, but when I was finished I called her and told her we had a lot to learn. So we got on the Internet and started surfing. When we found a website called AliveAndWell.org, we knew we had hit pay dirt. I called Christine Maggiore, who ran Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, and after spending a couple hours on the phone with her, I was convinced there was something seriously wrong with the idea that HIV causes AIDS.”
“What did she say to convince you?”
“There’s no doubt that she gave me some really good information, but it was more how she said it than what she said. Here was an intelligent, well-educated, non-hysterical woman who herself had tested HIV-Positive in 1992, had never taken any HIV medications, and obviously knew her stuff. I read every page on the Alive & Well website, checked out all the information for myself, and validated every word with other cross-references in the medical and scientific literature. I came away convinced there was a giant fraud being perpetrated on the American people – and all people of the world for that matter.” Mac paused. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I was very angry when I discovered all of this information, and I’m still very angry today.”
Sarah now wishes she had been tape recording this phone call anyway. Here was a man who had obviously done his homework, was honest enough to admit when he had been wrong, and had turned around 180 degrees from where he started – from wanting to tattoo every HIV-Positive five years ago to looking forward to the day when those responsible for this travesty of science were brought to justice.
“So I got a copy of Christine’s book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong, and Sonja and I read it together. She then went right to her doctor, told him that she had some new information, and that she wasn’t going to take the drugs he was prescribing.”
“And the doctor’s reaction?”
“He literally screamed at her for daring to question the medical authorities. But, he said, if she was not going to take the medications, she at least had to keep getting tested periodically.”
Sarah just shakes her head, lamenting how far down the medical profession has sunk in this country.
“Sonja had to give the health department a list of all her sexual partners, so I was contacted from time to time and urged to take an HIV test myself. I refused. I told them that if they wanted to send a squad car full of policemen and a court order, I’d comply. Otherwise, I wouldn’t.”
“And they said?”
“They thought that was extremely irresponsible, and they kept calling for months. I kept refusing every time.”
“And how is Sonja today?”
“I don’t know, actually. We broke up some time after all this happened – not because she was HIV-Positive, but because of the difference in our ages. Let’s face it, I was old enough to be her father. The last I heard from her, she had moved to California, and her email said she was no longer HIV-Positive.”
“What?”
“Well, I guess that her first test was some kind of false positive, or just by moving, she wasn’t HIV-Positive any more. That can happen, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve talked to others who went from being HIV-Positive to HIV-Negative. But it’s still not very common.”
“Well, you are writing so much about how an HIV-Positive diagnosis has affected people’s lives, I thought maybe you should hear how it affects the ones around them as well.”
“Yes, thank you. It’s been interesting, to say the least. I’m glad you called.”
“And I thank you for your time. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mac.”
As she turns off her cell phone, Sarah looks at Gwen. Neither of them could speak.
Are You Positive? Page 18