Response to a letter concerning HERVs
Etienne de Harven
January, 2010

There are exogenous viruses and others which are endogenous!

For instance, in the case of a flu contagion, the virus that attacks you comes from another sick person! In this case, we may talk of an exogenous virus, which means this virus is coming from outside, by contagion.

If you expose yourself to too much ultraviolet radiation, on very sunny skiing slopes, and get a cold sore on your lip, this unpleasant pimple will apparently be due to the herpes virus that was hiding somewhere  inside of you, and was activated by the UV radiation! In this case, we’re talking about an endogenous virus, which means we’re carrying it inside ourselves.

There very probably must be something similar concerning retroviruses!

These famous mouse leukemia retroviruses I have talked about so much (maybe too much!) have always been INTERPRETED as being exogenous, although their contagiousness has never been proved.

And when the most illustrious Montagnier claimed he had discovered the AIDS virus, HIV was also considered an exogenous virus, which could therefore explain this disease’s contagiousness.

However, we know today that AIDS is not contagious.

Moreover, we have been aware, for 10 or 15 years, of the existence of endogenous retroviruses inside the human body!

They are called "Human endogenous retroviruses,"  HERVs! (Have a look at Human Endogenous Retroviruses on Google!)

ALL human beings are carrying them! You, me, and ALL others!

It is as if these HERVs had been engraved into our chromosomes and they apparently do us  no harm, although many laboratories are trying to demonstrate their possible pathogenic action.

Yet more amazing, when the human genome was eventually deciphered (and widely publicized!), it was reveled that approximately 8% of our genome is identical — or nearly identical — to retroviral genomes!

Our HERVs are somehow asleep in our chromosomes, and rarely manifest themselves as formed viral particles that can be observed with the electron microscope. Except in the human embryonic tissues, such as for instance, the placenta! In this tissue, it is different: in the human placental cells, it is easy to detect typical retrovirus particles, clearly visible with the electron microscope! Now, we’re getting there: these bloody viruses have distorted both the interpretation of and research concerning the so-called AIDS virus!

That’s what I tried — with an almost complete failure — to explain to them, to those “Rethinkers” who had come to listen to me in Oackland,  and who themselves ignore both the nature and the existence of HERVs.

In 1983, at the Institut Pasteur, Montagnier did mix his cell cultures with T-cells coming from umbilical cord blood, therefore PLACENTAL cells, most probably full of HERVs. That easily explains why they actually saw a lot of real retroviruses in their samples, but those viruses — the one they could readily examine — had strictly nothing to do with the AIDS patient they were examining using those very cell cultures. (Additionally, Montagnier reports, in another paper, that their experiments wouldn’t have worked if the T-cells they were mixing with their culture were not of placental origin.)

Another point: the AIDS patients’ so-called viral load:

Firstly,  no one could ever see a single retrovirus in AIDS patients’ blood, even in those patients who were said to have a “high viral load”! Very strange, isn’t it?

But we all have DNA in our circulating blood. And, as I pointed out above, 8% of our DNA is identical to the retroviruses’ genome! Bingo! This is what they’re detecting with this intelligent PCR method which was invented by Nobel Prize laureate Kary Mullis! This is what they wrongly interpret as retroviral “molecular markers,” which are totally invisible, as already stated above.

In short, all so-called HIV research has been heavily distorted by the stubborn ignorance of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy’s researchers, who still refuse to admit that HERVs have pathetically distorted the interpretation of their results.

This is essentially what was in my presentation in Oakland (RA 2009).

Etienne