Sunday, January 09, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: No certainty about Africans and HIV

There's been a predictable wave of outrage (perhaps real; one can never tell) at a recent column on this page by economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, in which he asked whether the legal institution of marriage is really a "right" that can be bestowed on gay couples, or whether it isn't in fact a set of commonly accepted restrictions on the rights of the partners, adopted to facilitate support of the children resulting from (hetero) sexual unions.

I won't endeavor to defend Sowell's economic analysis, because he's better able and qualified than I to do that job.

But I found it interesting to again hear the old shrieks about how AIDS is not a "gay disease," since it's spreading out among females and heterosexuals as a sexually transmitted disease.

Since it's not.

We've been waiting a decade, now, for this prediction to come true. Remember, back in the '90s, hearing that "heterosexual women are the fastest growing group of AIDS victims"? Yeah: In a statistical stutter typical among small numbers, they were at one point up from half of one percent to a full percent -- most of those women turning out to be folks who shared needles with other intravenous recreational drug users.

Mind you, the fact that most of those dying of diseases that opportunistically strike those with impaired immune symptoms turn out to be gay men (and the rest, pretty much, injectable drug users) is no reason not to feel compassion for the victims, and to seek more scientifically accurate information to help prevent those outcomes. But the key word there is "information" -- myths that make people believe an "HIV-positive diagnosis" is a death sentence, justifying the immediate application of therapies which are in and of themselves highly toxic, hardly seem an appropriate way to support our gay and drug-using friends and brothers in their right to live as they see fit.

The last line of defense for those who persist in bruiting about many long-disproved AIDS myths seems to be the claim that "AIDS in Africa proves everything we've been saying."

But at http://www.sumeria.net/aids/aidsafrica.html , we find Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Department of Medical Physics, Royal Perth Hospital, Western Australia, and Valendar F. Turner, Department of Emergency Medicine, Royal Perth Hospital, writing:

"According to the World Health Organization, some 2.5 million sub-Saharan Africans have AIDS -- Africa is apparently in the grip of an AIDS pandemic. (In the USA 300,000 people have AIDS). AIDS in Africa is portrayed as providing two important lessons for the West. The first is an example of the potential devastation that AIDS can unleash, the second is that by heterosexual spread, AIDS will eventually overtake the West. However, there is no convincing evidence that millions of Africans are infected with HIV, the putative cause of AIDS, or that African AIDS is heterosexually spread.

"The only evidence that some Africans are 'infected' with a virus called HIV is indirect, the random testing of Africans' blood for the presence of antibodies that react with a collection of so-called HIV proteins," these medical professionals continue.

"If the 'HIV proteins' (present in the test kits) only reacted with HIV antibodies there would be no problem. Unfortunately this is not the case. Antibodies produced in response to the presence of one foreign agent may also react with another different foreign agent and the more infectious agents that a person has been exposed to, the greater is the likelihood that such cross-reacting antibodies will be present. ...

"Thus in Africa, no one knows whether the antibody tests are specific for HIV, that is, whether a positive test actually means HIV infection. ... In Africa there is no certainty that Africans are actually infected with a putative new agent, HIV. ...

"Unlike the West, in Africa AIDS is diagnosed without any laboratory tests, patients are classified as AIDS cases without laboratory proof that they have either immunodeficiency or HIV infection. ...

"Dr. Konotey-Ahulu from the Cromwell Hospital in London expresses a similar view: 'Today, because of AIDS, it seems that Africans are not allowed to die from these conditions [from which they used to die before the AIDS era] any longer. If tens of thousands are dying from AIDS (and Africans do not cremate their dead) where are the graves?'

"According to him, the uppermost question in the minds of intelligent Africans and Europeans in that continent is: 'Why do the world's media appear to have conspired with some scientists to become so gratuitously extravagant with the untruth?' "

The entire article is well worth a read, as are the excellent, well-researched, profusely footnoted books "Inventing the AIDS Virus," by Dr. Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., member of the National Academy of Sciences and professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the slimmer "What If Everything You Thought You Knew about AIDS Was Wrong?" (available through www.aliveandwell.org), by Christine Maggiore, who tested "HIV positive" in 1992, initially accepted and spouted all the same guff the mainstream "AIDS activists" still peddle, but eventually began to ask how on earth toxic therapies could make people well, decided to simply take care of her health, and has since remained perfectly healthy, marrying and bearing "two beautiful, healthy children, ages 6 and 2, who have never had so much as an ear infection."

More upbeat news -- along with more on "AIDS in Africa" -- from Ms. Maggiore next week.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "The Ballad of Carl Drega" and the forthcoming "The Black Arrow."