Unravelling AIDS
What is the real extent of the AIDS epidemic? Why does AIDS attract so
much controversy? Do conventional anti HIV drugs do more harm than good? Are
there safe and effective treatments that can be made widely available at
affordable costs?
This special mini-series is part of an in-depth report, Unravelling
AIDS, to be published by ISIS later this year.
If you are interested in reserving a copy of the full report at a
special prepublication price of £7.50, please e-mail sam@i-sis.org.uk
ISIS Report 31/03/04
African AIDS Epidemic?
An estimated 26.6 million in Sub-Saharan Africa are living with HIV/AIDS,
according to official figures. But critics say these statistics are nothing
more than hype shrouded in smoke and mirrors. Sam Burcher reports.
A fully referenced
version of this report is posted on ISIS
member's website. Full details here
Being HIV positive is the usual requirement for an AIDS diagnosis, but testing
for HIV is something of a misnomer in Africa where no HIV test is required to
make an AIDS diagnosis. That is because, in October 1985, a conference of public
health officials including representatives of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control)
and WHO (World Health Organisation) met in Bangui, Central Africa to agree on
a diagnostic definition of AIDS in Africa.
This would allow clinicians to identify an AIDS patient and also allow serious
counting of such patients to begin. The Bangui definition is [1]: “prolonged
fevers for a month or more, weight loss of over 10% and prolonged diarrhoea.”
Agreeing this definition has meant that traditional African diseases linked
to poverty, war, famine, tropical climate, open latrines and contaminated water
are all neatly relabelled AIDS diseases. The consensus on Bangui is that “it
has proved useful in areas where no testing in available.” But as Charles
Gilks of the BMJ (British Medical Journal) pointed out in 1991 [2], “persistent
diarrhoea with weight loss can be associated with ordinary enteric parasites
and bacteria.” And, “in countries where the incidence of TB is high,
substantial numbers of people reported as having AIDS may not in fact have AIDS.”
Since 1993, endemic diseases such as TB have been included as AIDS defining
illnesses, and in 2002, the WHO dropped TB down their world’s greatest
killer list and moved AIDS up as the leading cause of death. The Statistical
Assessment Service (STATS) suggested that this is an attempt to “shift
huge chunks of death around”[3]. Cervical cancer has recently been added
to the list of AIDS defining diseases, which is easy to treat if detected quickly,
but life threatening if not.
Professor Charles Gershetker, a frequent visitor to Africa as part of his research
for the California State University, discovered that some pre-natal clinics
were providing tests for HIV and collecting data. The problem with this is that
pregnancy is one of the many conditions that can give a false positive result
with the standard ‘ELISA’ test. Other known diseases to trigger
an incorrect result are hepatitis, influenza, malaria, TB and recent vaccination.
So the yearly ‘HIV positive’ results returned from 4 000 pregnant
women are extrapolated by the WHO’s epidemiological computer to represent
the entire populations’ male, female young and old, burden of AIDS.
AIDS ‘dissident’ Professor Jens Jerndal from the Group For The
Scientific Reappraisal Of The HIV Causes AIDS Hypothesis suggests that statistics
are illusionist tricks to inflate the numbers of AIDS sufferers to inspire sufficient
terror or panic in the general population, so as to enable the introduction
of mandatory medical interventions, or constraints in freedom of movement or
behaviour by those in power [4]. And for that, presenting the cumulative figure
of those suffering from AIDS has more impact than reporting the number of new
cases in a year, which would give a more accurate picture of the epidemic.
The practice of widening the definitions of diseases diagnosed as AIDS also
concerns Prof Jerndal. At least twenty-nine different illnesses that existed
before AIDS are considered as AIDS when they are accompanied by a HIV positive
test. But there are more than sixty different conditions that can cause a positive
result that bear no relation to HIV or AIDS. Jerndals’ message is that
the world has been sold the unproven HIV causes AIDS dogma along with a fatal
drugs regime of conventional medicine that goes with it.
Misdiagnoses can have a devastating effect on the life of a patient and aside
from inaccurate results a positive test for HIV is by no means predictive of
the development of AIDS [5]. But, so far no real distinction is made between
the two [6]. Worse still, in Africa, an AIDS diagnoses can mean existing treatment
is withheld altogether because of the entirely unjustified fatal prognosis attached
to the illness.
In whose interests would the creation of numbers of people suffering from a
fatal disease in epic proportions? In the US in 2000, under President Clinton,
AIDS in Africa, not in the US, was declared a matter of national security. It
was suggested that while AIDS was confined to the homosexual community in the
US, it was containable, but once heterosexual transmission had been established
in Africa then everyone had a reason to panic and AIDS budgets soared [3].
All Africans are being unfairly labelled as insatiable, sexually promiscuous,
reckless people while their key issue of poverty remains ignored. Statistics
report HIV rates of infection as high as 25% in some African countries and more
women than men are infected [7]. World Bank statistics for those living with
AIDS in sub-Saharan African are at 29.4 million while in Cairo, Egypt, a short
boat trip down the river, reveals 215 cases of HIV/AIDS in a population of 65
million [8].
UN anti-poverty strategies that promised to halve debts in sub-Saharan African
by 2015 are now, according to UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, more likely to happen
in 2147. Under the auspices of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund $2.5 billion is transferred from sub-Saharan African banks into foreign
banks and creditors accounts every year. A further blow is President Bush proposal
to cut core funding to Africa. Gordon Brown and singer Bono are calling for
a doubling in aid cash to Africa [9].
People are dying of diseases in Africa caused by inadequate living conditions
and they deserve help now to improve quality of life primarily by access to
clean water and good nutrition. Constructive help like sustainable agricultural
plans would enable them to feed themselves [10]. And encouraging the use of
affordable insecticide treated mosquito bed nets would combat the millions of
annual infant malarial deaths. [11]
Assistance like this could replace the manipulative measures of foisting US
tax credit goods on African states. While thousands starved, pharmaceutical
companies made incongruous ‘donations’ of appetite stimulants to
Sudan, and silicone implants to Malawi. These companies then claimed tax credit
for their useless gifts and the recipient countries had to pay to dispose of
them [12].
It is unlikely that attaching emerging and traditional diseases to an AIDS
definition is useful for tackling the key problems of malnutrition and sanitation,
but it would encourage the use of pharmaceutical drugs. Costs for conventional
drugs are still prohibitive for many Africans and purchasing governments incur
even greater debts to the World Bank. In order for any drug therapy to be truly
successful it must be used in tandem with adequate nutrition and sanitary conditions.
One of the most recent combination therapy drugs is called Nevirapine; a non-nucleoside
reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI), which reduces the viral load in HIV
infection, is causing neuropsychiatric side effects in patients with HIV, but
with no history of mental illness [13]. Three patients undergoing treatment
developed psychotic reactions to the drugs. Two made impulsive suicide attempts
after suffering command hallucinations while the third experienced persecutory
delusions and depressive thoughts after starting nevirapine. Physical side effects
include hepatotoxicity, gastrointestinal symptoms, and dermatological reactions.
Dr David Rasnick, a leading ‘AIDS dissident’ and designer of protease
inhibitors (PI’s), a drug used in the treatment of HIV infection, is confident
that PI’s can help reduce viral load, but is unconvinced that HIV causes
AIDS. He said in an interview for the San Francisco Herald in October 2000 “In
fact, I’m pretty sure right now there’s no such thing as an AIDS
epidemic in Africa, from my previous two trips last May and this July. The reason
I say that in brief is that we’ve looked and looked and asked people,
the government ministers, we asked the director of the medical research council
in South Africa, the Centers for Disease Control in the US, everybody we could
ask, “What are the numbers of AIDS cases in South Africa and how many
AIDS deaths?” No answer at all. Zero. To this date we do not have an answer
to that, and in fact, I don’t think there is any such thing as AIDS going
on in South Africa. It’s just the same old things that Africans have been
suffering and dying from for generations due to poverty, malnutrition, poor
sanitation, bad water, that sort of thing. We’re calling it AIDS now,
instead of by the old-fashioned names that were more honest.”
Professor P Addy, Head of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Science
and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, backs up the opinions of AIDS dissidents. He
said: “I’ve known a long time that AIDS is not a crisis in Africa
as the world is being made to understand. The West came out with those frightening
statistics on AIDS in Africa because it is unaware of certain social and clinical
conditions. In most of Africa infectious diseases, particularly parasitic infections
are common. And these are the conditions that can easily compromise or affect
one’s immune systems. He concludes [14]: “The diagnosis itself,
merely being told you have AIDS is enough to kill and is killing people.”
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