> So I conclude that HIV skepticism is like creationism, a wacko
> > position.
>
> i urge you to go and check out the opposition. i also urge you to stop
> using overinflated terminology. 15 years ago, my jaw used to drop in
> amazement when i saw these books that questioned the reality of HIV or
> AIDS. i was convinced, as you seem to be now, that only a nut could
> advocate such a position. now i am ashamed of that response, one that
> indicated how easily a population of people is trained not to ask
> questions.
>
> That is why Mbeke should not accept it and promulgate it.
>
> AIDS, as i said earlier, is a paradigm in serious crisis and it has
> been for a long time. that should be clear to anybody who takes a
> careful look. just as one need not be a trained economist to figure
> out that capitalist logic does not quite add up, one need not be a
> medical doctor to know when a certain medical logic is not explaining,
> in any plalusible manner, all the phenomenah it is supposed to
> explain.
>
Chris, I personally believe that HIV causes AIDS (based on various studies - e.g. the experience in Zambia - where the spread of HIV/AIDS did not match poverty statistics - is a pretty good counter-argument to the AIDS = poverty argument), but I doubt we'll resolve the argument on LBO-talk. Differences of this magnitude are seldom amenable to debate.
A whole lot of people in South Africa (including the Pan Africanist Congress's spokesperson on Health issues, a doctor named Costa Gazi) have taken a rather careful look at the AIDS issue. The situation in South Africa - where members of the government have access to anti-retrovirals, while the same ANC government denies such access to poor, black majority - forces a close inspection of this topic. The consensus amongst HIV/AIDS activists is:
* anti-retrovirals are shown to lower the risk of mother to child transmission of HIV. Thus they should be provided by the government.
* various rich people in South Africa (most famously Judge Edwin Cameron) can afford drug cocktail treatments and seem to be doing well with them. Poor people should also be given this option.
* various medicines to treat opportunistic infections which AIDS suffers suffer from should be acquired cheaply, however possible (e.g. via deals with pharmacos, or via compulsory licensing) and provided. *NOTE:* even if you don't believe HIV causes AIDS, you should support this. Yet Mbeki, and the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, oppose this, and an ANC spokesperson compared the illegal import of a generic equivalent of the drug fluconazole to 'apartheid era biological warfare'.
* an honest debate on HIV/AIDS is necessary. This is not possible when the ANC accusses COSATU (the union federation) of being 'infiltrated by TAC' when it criticises Mbeki.
Mbeki's position is, almost certainly, the result of a combination of single-minded promotion of the GEAR macro-economic policy (a kind of self-imposed SAP designed along with researchers from the World Bank and (white Afrikaner dominated) Stellenbosch university) and an authoritarian disregard for suffering.
In the end, the debate on HIV and AIDS has been deployed as a delaying tactic in South Africa. And anyway, whatever you believe on the debate, the actions of the SA government are unjustifiable (in this sphere, as in so many others, such as housing, services, etc.). Mbeki deserves to be locked up along with all the other agents of capitalism (both Apartheid and post-Apartheid style).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B