As a visitor to our website we realize that it is probably unfair to ask that your attention stray too far from music, but we'd hope that you could for a moment.

  The current thinking on AIDS is in serious need of reconsideration. At the heart of it are questions about the reliability of current research, the accuracy of tests, the safety and effectiveness of treatments, the direction of education, and the wisdom of public health policies. As a result, people are often hurt by the same institutions that are meant to help them. Please take a minute to consider this information. These could be new ideas to you and are likely to be in direct contradiction to what you have been taught about AIDS, so please read carefully and with an open mind. We encourage you to share this information with your friends, parents, teachers, doctors, and anyone who might find it interesting or helpful. Open discussion is the key to finding meaningful answers about AIDS, and to helping people recover and maintain their health. Just as we are asking that you turn a critical eye toward accepted thinking on AIDS, we'd like you to be careful in your evaluation of these ideas.

  The band has come out in support of Alive and Well AIDS Alternatives, an organization dedicated to helping open the dialog concerning AIDS. There is more information about their work below, and if you'd like to learn more, please visit their site, AliveAndWell.org

thank you.

AIDS is a new category for 30 familiar diseases like yeast infections, tuberculosis, certain cancers and pneumonias. All of these 30 AIDS diseases have well known causes and treatments that are completely unrelated to HIV, and none of the diseases occur only in people who test HIV positive. Since AIDS is a category and not a disease, the definition of AIDS can change from country to country. In fact, according to the Canadian definition, more than 180,000 Americans diagnosed with AIDS would not have AIDS if they moved to Canada. Studies show that when people diagnosed with "AIDS" are treated for their actual health problems using non-toxic, non-HIV based therapies, recovery and continued good health are possible.

Although more money has been spent on HIV than on all other viruses ever studied in history combined, there is still no scientific evidence that proves HIV is the cause of AIDS. In fact, HIV was declared the cause of AIDS before any major research into HIV even began. Since HIV is a retrovirus, a kind of virus that does not have the cell-killing ability needed to cause disease, more and more researchers are questioning why HIV has been the sole focus of AIDS research, prevention and treatment.

HIV tests don't detect HIV, the virus assumed to cause AIDS. They detect antibodies that respond to certain proteins thought to specifically identify HIV but because none of these proteins are specific to HIV, antibodies produced in response to more than 60 conditions (including herpes, hepatitis, the flu, vaccinations, malaria and pregnancy) can be misread by the test as HIV antibodies. This means healthy people who have never been exposed to HIV may repeatedly test positive on HIV tests. And even if tests detected only HIV antibodies, testing positive still would not mean that someone is infected. Only a test that has been verified by a "gold standard" of virus isolation can be used to accurately tell when a person who has antibodies is also infected with the virus. This gold standard of accuracy has never been established for HIV tests or for newer viral load tests. As test manufacturers' statements warn, "viral load is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HV infection."

The number of Americans that government AIDS experts claim are HIV positive has not increased once since HIV tests came into general use in 1985. In fact, this number has actually decreased while rates of other sexually transmitted diseases have risen. In the period of time known as the AIDS epidemic, more than 15 million Americans have been diagnosed with gonorrhea or syphilis, while the official estimate of HIV positives in the US has dropped from 1.5 million to 750,000.

94% of AIDS diagnosis in the US are given to people in very specific AIDS risks groups that do not describe the general population. Every year more people in the US die in car accidents than of AIDS, and each year three times as many people die of heart disease than have ever died of AIDS. While AIDS is said to be highly contagious, in the 19 years known as the AIDS epidemic, there has not been a single case of work-related AIDS reported in the medical literature among any healthcare professionals including paramedics, surgeons, dentists, and emergency medical technicians-the people most at risk. Last year, out of 26 million US teenagers, less than 300 were diagnosed with AIDS while more than 1,000 young Americans actually had strokes.

One example of popular news about AIDS with no basis in fact are recent reports that AIDS is rising among America's ethnic minorities. According to the US Center for Disease Control, AIDS diagnoses among all people of color have been declining steadily since at least 1996.

It is estimated that in South Africa, four million people are infected with HIV yet only 12,825 actual AIDS cases have ever been reported there while infant mortality has not increased and life expectancy is at an all time high. In fact, AIDS cases for the entire continent total under 800,000 while news reports that give other figures are based on projections. One recent UN estimate claimed that people in Kenya are dying of AIDS at a rate of one every three minutes. If this were true, there would be more dead Kenyans in one year than have ever been given an AIDS diagnosis in the whole time known as the AIDS epidemic.

AIDS cases in the US peaked in 1992 and grew dramatically in 1993 when the official definition of AIDS was expanded to include additional illnesses as well as people who test HIV positive but are not sick. With this change to the AIDS definition, the number of AIDS cases doubled overnight, but has been declining in all risks groups every year since. Since 1993, more than half of all Americans diagnosed with AIDS are not ill. AIDS deaths peaked nationally in 1994, two years before the new "AIDS cocktails" were made available for general use. Today, AIDS experts agree that only a small portion of HIV positive Americans are on the new drugs-less than 10% according to some-while media reports acknowledge that the new drugs fail for 50% of patients and cause liver failure in 1 in 10 users and physical deformities in up to 80%.