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SCMP Reporter

A NOBEL prize winner's claim that HIV is a harmless virus which does not cause AIDS, came under fire yesterday from the Department of Health.

  US scientist Dr Kary Mullis, who is visiting Hong Kong, won the Nobel prize for chemistry last year.

  He said at the Chinese University yesterday that the drive to find a cure for AIDS was a ''religious phenomenon'' and there was no scientific evidence that HIV was the culprit for the deadly disease.

  ''There are many people with AIDS who do not have HIV, and a lot of people who have HIV who have not got AIDS,'' he said.

  But the department said his comments were unhelpful to its campaign to halt the spread of the disease.

   Dr Mullis said the epidemic predicted around the world had not happened. Instead, health authorities had changed the definition of the disease to classify more people as having AIDS.

   The amount of money pumped into finding a cure or vaccine for HIV meant that scientists had kept going along this road without considering other possibilities.

  ''In the US, there are 4,600 cases who have AIDS without HIV. The doctors renamed the disease in these people,'' Dr Mullis said.

   ''Everybody jumped on the US$2 billion bandwagon'' when HIV was first proposed as the reason.

 He suggested the disease was caused by a huge build-up of viruses - one of which might be HIV - which overloaded the body's immune system.

  Such a build-up had begun among homosexual, urban men who had a lot of contact with many different people and therefore exposure to thousands of different viruses. The disease in Africa was caused by a different virus, as 30 per cent of its genetic material was not the same as HIV.

   But he dismissed the suggestion that he should carry out what he described as ''a simple set of experiments'' to explore his hypothesis.

  ''I've tried to persuade others to do the experiments, but I'm not an AIDS researcher, I come up with the ideas,'' he said.

  But the Department of Health's AIDS consultant, Dr Lee Shui-shan, countered that it was ''criminal'' to say without proof that HIV was not the cause of AIDS.

    ''You are not helping people with the disease'' by saying that research being done is wrong, he said.

  He dismissed the idea there was no epidemic. ''Go to Thailand, go to India - in Africa too, there are so many people dying,'' he said.

  Sister Maureen McGinley of AIDS Concern said scientists should co-operate to find the cause.

    ''If you are saying it's not the cause, well tell me what is the cause and let's do something,'' she said.

  Dr Leong Che-hung of the AIDS Foundation said ''we should not close our minds'' to other reasons, but ''unless we have proof it would be wrong to disrupt the programme''.



AIDS comments draw fire