>Well-connected South African scientists and activists have known for
>months that Mbeki was flirting with the dissident theories, and their
>e-mails, some of which have been obtained by the Voice, show an ever
>increasing concern. The first tip-off came last October, when Mbeki
>ordered his health minister to review the safety of AZT, saying that
>"a large volume of scientific literature" alleges that the drug is so
>toxic that "it is in fact a danger to health." That effectively put
>on hold plans to make the drug available to pregnant women. "That's
>when I started feeling a very strange plot was afoot," said Ashraf
>Grimwood, a physician who chairs the National AIDS Convention of
>South Africa.
>
This is weird. AZT is chemotherapy. It kills cells. Of course it's toxic.
It's designed to be toxic.
>Mbeki's statement sharply contradicted the international medical
>consensus that the benefits of AZT outweigh its risks, and it also
>ran contrary to a South African study of AZT used in combination with
>another drug, 3TC. That large study found no more side effects among
>women and infants taking the drugs than among those taking a placebo.
>
Since AZT is toxic by itself, it's hard to believe that its toxicity is
cancelled out by this other drug, 3TC. Its benefits outweigh its risks only
if it actually fights AIDS. We don't know that. We just know it reduces
levels of HIV in the blood. People do not necessarily feel better as HIV
levels go down. Often they feel better after they go off the drugs, as
their HIV levels rise.
>Using scraps of truth, along with distortions and outright
>misstatements, the AIDS dissidents patch together a coherent, if
>erroneous, theory of AIDS. In the industrialized world, they believe
>that AIDS is caused by "lifestyle" factors-especially the use of
>various recreational drugs-and even by anti-HIV drugs such as AZT.
>Even before the drug cocktails reduced AIDS death rates throughout >the
industrialized world that theory had already been demolished by
>epidemiological studies.
There's no reason to believe that the cocktail therapy has reduced the AIDS death rate, which had been dropping for two years prior to the announcement of the new therapy. The only thing we know with certainty about the multi-drug treatment is that it brings on heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure. It is marketed primarily to healthy people with HIV. The fact that they don't always die after they take it does not mean it's doing anything good for them. A lot of people who were healthy with HIV for 15 years got sick only after trying the cocktail therapy (which was originally touted as a virtual cure for HIV). Of those who showed improvement, many have since relapsed.
>According to a report from the U.S. National
>Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, "Individuals as
>different as homosexual men, elderly transfusion recipients,
>heterosexual women, drug-using hetero- sexual men, and infants have
>all developed AIDS with only one common denominator: infection with
>HIV."
>
Thousands of people diagnosed with AIDS have been tested and found to be
free of HIV. They are simply redefined as not having AIDS. Countless more
have never been tested. It's assumed that they must have HIV. On top of
that, the AIDS test is notorious for false positives. Who knows how many
people with AIDS did not actually have the virus they tested positive for?
>Of course, the Western lifestyle theory is patently absurd for AIDS
>in Africa, where illicit and pharmaceutical drugs are rare, so the
>dissidents argue that AIDS in underdeveloped countries is simply a
>new name for long-standing diseases caused by malnutrition, unclean
>water, and the other scourges of poverty.
>
According to Duesberg, if you're chronically unhealthy, with a weakened
immune system, you're liable to come down with one of the thirty or so
illnesses grouped together under AIDS. If he's right, then we should expect
far more people with AIDS in the South than the US. You can see why Mbeko
would find this intriguing. It means that we're ignoring poverty and
malnutrition as a cause of disease and blaming HIV instead. It's not
capitalism-- it's a virus!
>Thus Rasnick and fellow AIDS dissident Charles Geshekter wrote to >Mbeki
asking his government to consider "what evidence is there that
>people with antibodies to HIV live shorter, poorer lives than people
>in the same community who do not have antibodies to HIV? We know of
>no such evidence." But various studies in Africa have answered
>exactly this point. A study of 1400 Rwandan women, for example, found
>that those who tested HIV antibody positive were 20 times more likely
>to die than their negative counterparts, while two studies from
>Uganda also found stark differences in the death rates between
>HIV-positive and -negative adults.
>
Rasnick and Geshekter don't seem to have a very good handle on the dissident
position, which is summed up in a 1995 article in the World Journal of
Microbiology and Biotechnology. "The presence of positive HIV serology in
Africans represents no more than cross-reactivity caused by an abundance of
antibodies induced by the numerous infectious and parasitic diseases which
are endemic in Africa." Apparently there are nearly 70 diseases common to
Africa which set off false positives for HIV. Africans who test positive
are probably infected with one or more of these diseases. For this reason
they are more liable to die than those who test negative. On the other
hand, if the establishment view is correct, and all those Africans really do
have HIV, then they must be incredibly promiscuous, far more so than
Americans. Ordinarily this is called "racism."
>Despite a decade of vociferous argument, the dissidents have failed >to
convince a single major medical authority-and precious few
>doctors.
A decade ago there was one AIDS dissident: Peter Duesberg. Now there are hundreds of people in the medical community publicly questioning the HIV hypothesis. Lots of HIV+ people share this view. ACT UP San Francisco is with the dissidents. But don't look for any pharmaceutical companies to join up any time soon.
Ted