On this day in 1987, the UK’s Channel Four broadcast AIDS: The Unheard Voices, as one of it’s Dispatches series. [You can watch the programme at the end of this post.]

The documentary’s main focus was Professor Peter Duesberg who was – and remains – an HIV sceptic. (He actually says in the programme, “I wouldn’t mind for one moment to be antibody positive”.) It asked why alternative theories on AIDS causation were receiving little publicity and even less funding.

The programme began by laying out Duesberg’s five key arguments against the HIV link to AIDS:

1. That there were people with AIDS with no detectable HIV
2. There were people living with HIV who hadn’t developed AIDS
3. That HIV advocates suggested that the virus might lie dormant for a long period, yet a dormant virus couldn’t cause disease
4. HIV lives within its host cell; it doesn’t kill it, so it can’t cause damage
5. There are never sufficiently high levels of virus within an individual to present a risk of infection

(Bearing in mind that this was 30 years ago, it would be interesting to know whether Duesberg has changed any of these now that our knowledge and experience of HIV/AIDS is much greater.)

Various people were interviewed – including those who did support the HIV theory as well as those who didn’t. Notable exceptions were Professor John Gallo and Dr Luc Montagnier, generally held to be the ‘discoverers’ of HIV.

One of the areas covered was alternative theories of AIDS causation. These included:

• AIDS was essentially inadequately treated syphilis (people had been given the wrong type of penicillin)
• AIDS was a variant of African Swine Fever
• AIDS was caused principally by an enzyme – transglutaminase – transmitted in semen and/or blood plasma. This enzyme may have interacted with HIV.