I've lost so many Southern African friends--clean-living folk, activists, people who are middle-class and who are poor, and who, universally, could not afford the cocktails needed to stay alive because of fucking patents and profiteering multinational drug companies--that it sickens me to run into AIDS-denialists. (Especially in Pretoria, in the president's office, where it's merely a front for fiscal constraints to a humane AIDS policy.) Pretending there's a science worth debating here, after all we've been through, in the middle of a Black Plague pandemic, simply distracts us from the essential tasks at hand.
(If you want those tasks, you can check an interview I did this month with Zackie Achmat, the leader of SA's heroic Treatment Action Campaign, in the next Multinational Monitor; would put it up on screen here but I don't know if there's a copyright problem...)
> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 15:32:43 +0200
> From: Peter van Heusden <pvh at industrial.egenetics.com>
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 11:03:19AM +0100, Christopher B. Hajib-Niles wrote:
> Doug wrote:
> > > Null is a bete noire of mine, so if anyone who knew the science could
> > > take a look at this, I'd be grateful. Here are some excerpts
> We've been through this before, but let me re-iterate: the record of the
> emergence of AIDS in Uganda
> 1) does not match patters of malnutrition. If AIDS was actually
> the same old malnutrition, you'd expect to see it more in poorer areas -
> this is not the case.
> 2) happened before the use of experimental anti-AIDS drugs
> 3) did not involve isolation of people with HIV.