The emergence of AIDS in the US: interview with Roberto Giraldo, MD

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Oct, 2005 by Marcus A. Cohen

AIDS is a severe acquired immunodeficiency due to multiple, repeated, and chronic exposures to immunological stressor agents, with degenerative immunotoxic and/or immunogenic effects on immunocompetent cells and immunological chemical reactions. These progressive and continuous assaults on the immune system network bring the individual into a functional immunological deficit, with the subsequent appearance of infections, neoplasias, and metabolic conditions, all leading to a probable early death. Therefore AIDS, rather than being an infectious syndrome, is a chronic degenerative toxic/nutritional state.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

--Giraldo, RA, et al, Is it rational to treat or prevent AIDS with toxic
antiretroviral drugs in pregnant women, infants, children, or anybody
else?
Continuum (London) Summer 1999; 5(50): 38-52

In the late 1970s, several years before the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) reported the first cases of AIDS in the US, Dr. Roberto Giraldo predicted that the lifestyle of some gay men in the US, particularly their heavy use of recreational drugs, would cause many of them to suffer a total collapse of the immune system.

A sketch of his career, drawn from an interview with him and Michael Ellner, president of HEAL, and follow-up phone calls provide the background for his prediction. (See Townsend Letter, Aug./Sept. 2005, for Ellner's observations during that double interview about the early period of AIDS.)

Born in Medellin, the second largest Colombian city, notably rich in cultural institutions, Dr. Giraldo graduated from the medical school of the University of Antioquia in 1969. He spent the next year in rural practice (a requirement for newly graduated physicians), where he worked side by side with researchers in malaria and other tropical illnesses.

In 1974, he competed for and won a British Council Scholarship, enabling him to attend the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. There, he read papers from clinical researchers in developing areas of the world; these included reports that Kaposi's sarcoma afflicted men, women, and children in impoverished sub-Saharan African villages, and that KS could be reversed through adequate nutrition.

KS in AIDS patients on nitrite drugs--"poppers" taken to intensify sexual pleasure--develops in the lungs and intestinal tract, and can spread throughout the body. Its appearance in the lungs, never seen before in humans, is likely due to inhalation of nitrites. Mainstream oncologists primarily treat KS-with radiation. (1)

Dr. Giraldo returned to Colombia in late 1975 with a Masters degree in clinical tropical medicine and concentrated his clinical research on acquired immune deficiencies. Hearing of a rising infection rate in the US gay community, he entreated friends in New York (his Colombian classmates) to send him every scrap of information about gays there.

They joshed him for his sudden preoccupation with gay men. "Roberto, why?" he remembered them asking during our interview, "You're going to be gay?" "Don't worry about that," he answered, "I just need to know what they do. I'm interested in their social life."

"About five years before AIDS started," he said, "I made the connection between certain gay people and drugs." Inquiring into the behavior of gays, absorbing studies on the topic over the next several years, Dr. Giraldo traced back the connection to the end of the Vietnam War.

Up to the early 1970's, he proposed, most Americans who wanted a high smoked marijuana, or took psychedelics (e.g., mushrooms). He cited the Woodstock rock concert (1971), where the aroma of marijuana filtered through the crowd. "They were doing that for peace, for love." But they weren't into hard drugs--chemicals, narcotics. Soldiers became addicted to narcotics in Vietnam, and coming home they wanted more. "That's my view," he emphasized.

"A small percentage of gay people in America were very prone to drugs, taking some recreationally, others therapeutically; antibiotics, for instance, for the more frequent infections they were experiencing. Nitrites started in the gay community, among medical doctors who were gay, I believe. And I knew in 1970 that they were aphrodisiac. [They are normally used for cardiac examination.]

At a meeting of a union of doctors in Bogota in 1978, Dr. Giraldo sat on a scientific committee; by then, he had gained recognition for astute critical judgment. "There, I spoke about immune deficiencies in malnutrition in Africa, in hemophiliacs," he recalled in our interview. "And I said at that meeting if gay people in America continue doing what they are doing, they are going to collapse the immune system."

When AIDS was declared a new illness in 1981, Dr. Giraldo was in the jungle in Colombia. "I had connections with the university, but I was living in the jungle, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping poor people, working with shamans and natural healers."

Shortly after, he started to hear that the CDC was thinking that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. He scoffed at the notion. "This is stupid! This is not an infectious disease," he objected. "And very soon they are going to come up with a virus, or with something, and this is ridiculous."