>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.
One of the reasons that the science has always been contentious on AIDS is that the disease was very heavily politicised from the outset. Rightwing governments and AIDS activists alike projected epidemics as part of the motivation of their own agendas (distinctive in each case, but both deriving authority from the presumed heterosexual aids epidemic to come).
Because the predictions of the spread of aids did not materialise in the way assumed, the scientific theory of AIDS has always provoked dissidents like Duesberg, Joan Shenton and others. Such dissidents' own theories are problematic (the separation of HIV and AIDS is far from convincing). But the recurrence of the dissident theories is a natural outcome of the bad epidemiology that extrapolated millions of deaths from AIDS in the West by the nineties.
Thabo Mbeki's doubts about AIDS might well be motivated by a penny- pinching attitude to health care (it's not the richest country in the world) or even by homophobia (though I doubt it); But his suspicions about the health agenda of western-based NGOs is well-justified. The figures on African AIDS were artificially inflated by NGOs, playing on apocalyptic fears in the West about Africa, to lobby for more cash. It doesn't help Africa to diagnose deaths from tuberculosis as AIDS, any more than it helped the campaign against AIDS in the West to inflate the dangers. Such opportunism only breeds cynicism and undermines efective health care programmes.
-- Jim heartfield