Voir le sida autrement

The Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years

Brendan O'Neill
guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 12, 2008

Article history
Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to "high-risk groups", including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]", he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

Much of the media has treated Dr De Cock's admission as a startling revelation. In truth, experts have known for many years that in the vast majority of the world, Aids has little impact on the "general population". In her new book The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani – who worked for 10 years in what she refers to as "the Aids bureaucracy" – admits that by 1998 it was clear that "HIV wasn't going to rage through the billions in the 'general population', and we knew it".

Some people knew it earlier. In 1987, my friend and colleague Dr Michael Fitzpatrick wrote a fiery pamphlet titled The Truth About the Aids Panic. At the height of the Conservative government's scary tombstone campaign ("Don't die of ignorance"), he wrote: "There is no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals." In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of "heterosexual Aids" has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.

And it isn't the case that the heterosexual pandemic failed to materialise because officialdom's omnipresent pro-condom propaganda was a success. According to James Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the new book The Aids Pandemic, it was always a "glorious myth" that there would be an "HIV epidemic in general populations". That myth was the product of "misunderstanding or deliberate distortions of HIV epidemiology" by Unaids and other Aids activists, says Chin.

It is time to recognise that the Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the past 30 years. Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the "war against Aids" was turned into moral crusade.

Both Conservative and New Labour governments exploited the disease to create a new moral framework for society. Through baseless fearmongering, officials sought to police and regulate the behaviour of the public. No longer able to appeal to outdated Victorian ideals of chastity or restraint, the powers-that-be used the spectre of an Aids calamity to terrify us into behaving "responsibly" in sexual and social matters.

They were aided and abetted by the rump of the radical left. Gay rights campaigners, feminists and left-leaning health and social workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, first with the Tories and later with Labour, in spreading the "glorious myth" of a possible future Aids pandemic. An unholy alliance of old-style, prudish conservatives and post-radical, lifestyle-obsessed leftists latched on to Aids as a disease that might provide them with a sense of moral purpose.

And they ruthlessly sought to silence anyone who questioned them. Those who challenged the idea that Aids would devour sexually promiscuous young people and transform once-civilised western societies into diseased dystopias were denounced as "Aids deniers" and "heretics". Anyone who suggested that homosexuals were at greater risk than heterosexuals – and therefore the focus of government funding and, where necessary, medical assistance should be in gay communities – was denounced as homophobic. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the glorious moral effort to make everyone submit to the sexual and moral conformism of the Aids crusaders.

Even in Africa – where there is a serious and deadly Aids crisis in some countries – the international focus on Aids has been motivated more by pernicious moralism than straightforward charity. Diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are bigger killers than Aids. Yet focusing on Aids allows western governments and NGOs to lecture Africans about their morality and personal behaviour. It also adds a new gloss to the misanthropic population-control arguments of western charities, which now present their promotion of condoms in "overly fecund" Africa as a means of preventing the spread of disease.

The relentless politicisation and moralisation of Aids has not only distorted public understanding of the disease and generated unnecessary fear and angst – it has also potentially cost lives. James Chin estimates that UNAIDS wastes around $1bn a year in activities such as "raising awareness" about Aids and preventing the emergence of the disease in communities that are at little risk. How many lives could that kind of money save, if it were used to develop drugs and deliver them to infected or at-risk communities? It is time people treated Aids as a normal disease, rather than as an opportunity for spreading their own moral agendas.

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
SEMMELWEIS SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL
80 12th STREET, SUITE #307
WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA 26003
www.semmelweis.org
724-678-2648
“Supporting Fair and Proper Due Process in Medical Peer Review without Compromising
Medical Ethics or Patient Care”

PRESS RELEASE

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered the prevention of transmission of disease by washing hands (Prophylaxis), reducing the mortality rate due to Puerperal Fever from 12% to almost ZERO by enforcing the washing of hands with chlorinated lime.

At the time, Dr. Semmelweis' hypothesis was considered extreme and was widely rejected and ridiculed. When he refused to compromise his beliefs, the hospital that employed him was pressured into terminating his clinical privileges. Semmelweis' sole "crime" was that he proposed a contrarian idea to current thinking, which directly challenged the (incorrect) current medical theories of his time.

Despite the continued ridicule, hostility, and unemployment, Dr. Semmelweis tirelessly promoted his theory, sometimes denouncing physicians who refused to wash their hands as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries eventually concluded that he was crazy and, in 1865, committed him to a mental institution where he was beaten to death by guards.

Dr. Semmelweis’s theory was considered irrelevant, until Louis Pasteur connected germs to disease, and Prophylaxis is now considered standard practice around the world. The 1800s medical community’s refusal to consider his theories earlier clearly resulted in the continued unnecessary spread of disease and death throughout the world.

Backward and reactionary thinking did not die with Dr. Semmelweis in 1865. Highly qualified and competent physicians, scientists, healthcare personnel, and government employees continue to suffer similar retaliation throughout the United States, which is why organizations like Semmelweis Society International and the Alliance for Patient Safety participated in the recent Whistleblower Week in Washington.

The Semmelweis Society International annually recognizes individual Healthcare Providers, Researchers, and associated personnel, who have regularly challenged the status quo, who have reported issues, often controversial issues, regarding patient health and safety. Semmelweis Awardees have often had to endure the tyranny of threats and retaliation, and actual financial ruination, in some cases. Without these courageous individuals, progress and innovation in medicine, public service, and industry is inhibited, or negated.

One Semmelweis Laureate is Peter Duesberg, PhD. (http://www.duesberg.com), Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr Duesberg has asked legitimate but "outside the box" questions about the connection of HIV to AIDS, and even further questions regarding the documented toxicity of AIDS drugs. Drugs that are commonly used to fight the very immune deficiencies that these medications are known to affect adversely, or even to cause.

Dr. Duesberg does *not* advocate the reduction of clinical services or aid to Asia or Africa. Dr Duesberg simply questions the administration of drugs that are known to compromise human immune systems to patients whose immune systems are already compromised by poverty, malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, dirty water, drug use, or dangerous sexual practices. If Duesberg's contrarian concerns are true, the AIDS drugs themselves may be the proximate cause of some or all of the death statistics that pharmaceutical companies currently rely upon to promote the sale of their drugs.

Because the anti-AIDS Pharma Industry has already generated more than $200 billion in Pharma income from US government/US taxpayer funding, it is understandable why that same Pharma industry might attack individuals who propose alternative ideas and treatments that could save the lives of millions of AIDS sufferers around the world, but without their products (and at the loss of their profits).

A simple double blind parallel treatment study, with flawless monitoring in the gathering of clear and specific data, would allow evidence based approach to this question, and would be a standard for the industry as opposed to the present dogmatic approach.

In an era of evidence based medicine based on real reproducible results, how does one explain why organizations that are ostensibly pursuing the cure for AIDS would deliberately attack rational alternative solutions?

Members of Semmelweis Society International represent thousands of years of medical expertise and practice. They understand the power of competing ideas and the importance of open and rigorous debate. In the case of HIV/AIDS, the debate has been inexplicably muted by individuals and agencies that have handsomely profited by the hysteria related to HIV/AIDS. History reminds us that solid ideas are easily defended, while lesser theories can only be defended with fear, intimidation, and ridicule. If anything, these anti innovation strategies should sound the alarm for the medical community that treats AIDS patients.

The overt Hysteria deployed against those who are simply proposing the clinical and fully scientific review of new ideas should alarm public servants and elected officials who are responsible for supporting the First Amendment right for rational discourse.

American taxpayers have not been told the whole truth about the still-unidentified HIV virus, and its arguable relationship to the disease of AIDS, while ignoring the known toxicity of the drugs currently used to fight AIDS.

The taxpayers deserve a better break and a much clearer knowledge of how (and why and by whom) their tax dollars are being spent.

If Professor Duesberg and others are wrong, nothing is lost. But if Dr. Duesberg is correct, thousands, if not millions of people around the world may have died due to the toxic properties of AIDS drugs and the misdiagnosis/mistreatment of a still poorly understood disease.

Semmelweis Society International does not present the Clean Hands Award lightly. In Dr. Duesberg case, it is hard to imagine anyone more deserving than Professor Peter Duesberg and investigative reporter Celia Farber. These two have withstood a vicious and ongoing multiyear multicontinent personal onslaught against their livelihoods, their character, and their families that is unparalleled since the Spanish Inquisition.

Their sole "crime" is to ask if there has not been a colossal error in our thinking to date.

The simple facts are that nobody has ever been cured of AIDS. No Vaccine has ever been developed. Something is wrong here.

Dr. Duesberg has an idea, a contrarian idea; to be sure, it is an idea, nothing more, but nothing less.

Celia Farber's "crime" is to have reported this contrarian idea, into a First Amendment Free Speech Protected Society, or so we all thought.

We pray that our elected officials will not succumb to the hostility and pressures that the AIDS/Pharma industry will use to discredit and further silence this most vital debate.

We at Semmelweis are proud of our decision to present Dr. Peter Duesberg and Celia Farber with our highest honor and wish them both all the best as they continue to find concrete answers to this elusive and misunderstood disease.

Sincerely,

Roland F. Chalifoux Jr., DO
President, Semmelweis Society International

June 1, 2008

A 25-year health campaign was misplaced outside the continent of Africa. But the disease still kills more than all wars and conflicts

By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Dr De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn't look likely. But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas."

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis, which provides 20 per cent of all funding for Aids, warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. An estimated 1 per cent of the population was infected, mainly through injecting drug use, the same level of infection as in South Africa in 1991 where the prevalence of the infection has since risen to 25 per cent.

Dr De Cock said: "I think it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. But clearly there will be some spread."

Aids still kills more adults than all wars and conflicts combined, and is vastly bigger than current efforts to address it. A joint WHO/UN Aids report published this month showed that nearly three million people are now receiving anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, but this is less than a third of the estimated 9.7 million people who need them. In all there were 33 million people living with HIV in 2007, 2.5 million people became newly infected and 2.1 million died of Aids.

Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.

Dr De Cock labelled these the "four malignant arguments" undermining support for the global campaign against Aids, which still faced formidable challenges, despite the receding threat of a generalised epidemic beyond Africa.

Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease, or who used the disease as a weapon to stigmatise high risk groups, he said.

"Aids still remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public health. It is an acute infection but a chronic disease. It is for the very, very long haul. People are backing off, saying it is taking care of itself. It is not."

Critics of the global Aids strategy complain that vast sums are being spent educating people about the disease who are not at risk, when a far bigger impact could be achieved by targeting high-risk groups and focusing on interventions known to work, such as circumcision, which cuts the risk of infection by 60 per cent, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

There were "elements of truth" in the criticism, Dr De Cock said. "You will not do much about Aids in London by spending the funds in schools. You need to go where transmission is occurring. It is true that countries have not always been good at that."

But he rejected an argument put in The New York Times that only $30m (£15m) had been spent on safe water projects, far less than on Aids, despite knowledge of the risks that contaminated water pose.

"It sounds a good argument. But where is the scandal? That less than a third of Aids patients are being treated – or that we have never resolved the safe water scandal?"

One of the danger areas for the Aids strategy was among men who had sex with men. He said: " We face a bit of a crisis [in this area]. In the industrialised world transmission of HIV among men who have sex with men is not declining and in some places has increased.

"In the developing world, it has been neglected. We have only recently started looking for it and when we look, we find it. And when we examine HIV rates we find they are high.

"It is astonishing how badly we have done with men who have sex with men. It is something that is going to have to be discussed much more rigorously."

The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa – with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country – but nowhere else.

"It is the question we are asked most often – why is the situation so bad in sub-Saharan Africa? It is a combination of factors – more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships."

"Sexual behaviour is obviously important but it doesn't seem to explain [all] the differences between populations. Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships creating sexual networks that, from an epidemiological point of view, are more efficient at spreading infection."

Low rates of circumcision, which is protective, and high rates of genital herpes, which causes ulcers on the genitals through which the virus can enter the body, also contributed to Africa's heterosexual epidemic.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

Source : The Independent

16-05-2008 - La création de l’UNAIDS était fondée sur l'affirmation que le VIH était une maladie exceptionnelle. Une maladie catastrophique, demandant des mesures spéciales, des interventions multisectorielles, au-delà des seules capacités de l’OMS. Cet argument de l’exceptionnalité a été utilisé sur le plan politique, et pour obtenir d’énormes sommes d’argents par le biais de divers programmes de lutte contre le SIDA. Doté de sa propre agence, le VIH est devenu un secteur économique plus qu’une maladie.

Cette notion d’exceptionnalité est maintenant remise en question. Les études menées dans les pays d’Afrique noire montrent que la maladie ne touche pas les plus pauvres, mais surtout les classes moyennes. D’autres maladies causent beaucoup de ravages, ainsi que les catastrophes naturelles. Le VIH est un sérieux problème dans certains pays africains, mais elle n’est pas la catastrophe décrite par l’UNAIDS, dont les allégations telles que « une menace pour la survie et le bien-être des peuples partout dans le monde » tiennent beaucoup plus du sensationnalisme que de la réalité. De nombreux programmes très coûteux ont été mis en œuvre, et n’ont abouti nulle part. Des sommes importantes ont été gaspillées en commissions, en discussions ésotériques, en activités aussi variées qu’inefficaces.

Ce n’est plus une hérésie que de dire que beaucoup trop d’argent est dépensé pour le VIH par rapport aux autres besoins en matière de santé publique. Le VIH est à l’origine de seulement 3,7% de la mortalité, mais il reçoit 25% des fonds internationaux. Les aides allouées à certains pays pour le VIH peuvent dépasser le budget total de la santé de ces pays. Ces aides ont abouti à la création de circuits parallèles, qui ont affaibli les services de santé nationaux, ont eu un impact négatif sur la santé des populations de ces pays, et les ont rendu dépendants de notre aide. Et malgé cela, l’UNAIDS réclamme encore une augmentation massive de ces aides. L’UNAIDS est totalement déconnectée de la réalité, et elle détourne des ressources qui seraient bien plus utilement dépensées dans la lutte contre d’autres maladies.

En effet, ces pays n’ont pas besoin de davantage d’argent pour le VIH. Ils ont besoin d’un meilleur système de santé. L’argent ne devrait pas servir à lutter contre une maladie donnée, que ce soit le VIH, la tuberculose ou la malaria. Il devrait servir à renforcer le système de santé d’un pays, afin qu’il puisse lutter plus efficacement contre les diverses maladies auxquelles sa population est confrontée. Pourquoi ne pas créer une agence similaire à l’UNAIDS, pour lutter contre la pneumonie, ou contre le diabète, qui tuent tous les deux davantage de monde que le VIH à l’échelle planétaire ? L’UNAIDS devrait être dissoute. Ses fonctions devraient être reprises par l’OMS, afin que le VIH soit remis à sa place, parmi les autres maladies.

L’industrie du VIH est devenue un monstre incontrôlable, avec trop d’intérêts en jeu, trop de réputations qui se jouent, trop de gens bien payés, et trop de stars du rock qui soutiennent la lutte contre le SIDA pour leur image. Tant que nous n’aurons pas ôté au VIH cette aura d’exceptionnalité, les pays ne pourront pas avoir les systèmes de santé dont ils ont besoin.

Transmis par Françoise CREPIN

Source : The writing in on the wall for UNAIDS. R England. BMJ 2008 ; 336 : 1072.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7652/1072

Professor Peter Duesberg and Celia Farber are recipients of the Semmelweis " Clean Hands " Award, on May 13, in Washington, DC, in the Library of Congress. The event will begin at 8:30 AM till 5:00 PM. The screening of the movie " The Constant Gardner ", will follow in the evening with Professor Duesberg, Celia Farber and additional surprise guests, including Jonathan Fishbein MD, in the audience. Dr. Fishbein was a recipient of the Semmelweis " Clean Hands " Award, but could NOT accept it, as he is still working at the NIH. We will be happy to have members of your organization come to show their support and share their enthusiasm ! You are welcome to circulate this information, as it is a public record. Gil N. Mileikowsky MD President - Alliance for Patient Safety - http://www.allianceforpatientsafety.org Tel: 00-1-310-858.1300, in Los Angeles, California

Press ReleaseDecember 12, 2007

Verdict Of $2.5 Million Over False-Positive HIV Diagnosis
Brings up Basic Problems With AIDS Testing and Treatment, Say Scientists

CHICAGO, Dec. 12, 2007--A lawsuit decided today against the University of Massachusetts Medical Center over consequences of an allegedly false-positive HIV antibody test exposes basic problems with the test and treatments for all persons taking them, according to a high-ranking medical researcher who has advised the plaintiff’s lawyer on the case. The verdict, issued today, awarded $2.5 million to the plaintiff.

The complaint by Audrey Serrano, 45, in court hearings this week in Worcester, Mass., focused on the absence of a “confirmatory” Western Blot test in her records. However, Andrew Maniotis, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the Department of Pathology, University of Illinois-Chicago School of Medicine, contends that, though the reliability of all HIV testing was not on trial in court here, the case history opens questions about it. And, because Serrano developed illnesses commonly defined as “AIDS-related conditions” only after taking HIV medications known as “highly active antiretroviral therapy” (HAART), the drugs themselves appear to have caused “AIDS.”

Rethinking AIDS (RA) has been asking such questions since its founding in 1991. Etienne de Harven, M.D., president of RA, says, “It is urgent that we open a public debate on the highly suspect reliability of all HIV testing. Moreover, I fully share Dr. Maniotis' concern about the safety of HIV drugs.” Further resources are online at the group’s Web site,www.rethinkingaids.com.

Rodney Richards, Ph.D., worked on the development of antibody (ELISA) and genetic “viral load” tests for Amgen and holds some related patents. “The diagnosis of being HIV positive is based on arbitrary combinations of tests, none of which are approved for diagnosing HIV,” he says. “In fact there is no test for HIV. It’s just an illusion.”

Raising issues of informed consent for all persons submitting to HIV antibody testing, the test kits themselves contain disclaimers that doctors rarely, if ever, share with patients. For example, Abbott Laboratories’ ELISA test kit, typically used as a preliminary test, warns:

“ELISA testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS.”

Confirmation of an ELISA result with a Western Blot test is currently required as a “standard of care.” Epitope’s Western Blot package insert reads:

“Do not use this kit as the sole basis for HIV infection.”

“This is somewhat more concerning, since the Western Blot is supposed to be a highly accurate test, used to confirm that an ELISA is not a false positive,” says Dr. Maniotis. “Moreover, the peer-reviewed literature gives substantial evidence that the virus ‘HIV’ has never been isolated in purified form free of contaminating cellular debris in order to generate the so-called ‘specific viral antigens’ used in the test kits.”

Serrano, now acknowledged to have always tested HIV negative and therefore not to have been at risk for developing AIDS, nevertheless suffered from several AIDS-defining illnesses, including wasting, herpes, and oral thrush, while taking HAART. She also suffered from other health problems, including constant diarrhea (AIDS-defining under the African definition), muscle wasting, profound fatigue, non-specific skin lesions, oral thrush, herpes outbreaks, severe nosebleeds, constant gynecological bleeding and pain from ovarian cysts, fibrocystic breast lesions, hyperplastic pituitary lesions, and severe heart and respiratory difficulties.

Labels for HAART drugs actually list these conditions as possible side effects, suggesting that the drugs themselves cause AIDS-related conditions, Maniotis says.

Serrano’s experience is, sadly, not unique. Dr. Maniotis chose to investigate her case because, he says, “it is typical of many cases reviewed and, as it illustrates so clearly the development of AIDS-related conditions in a woman testing HIV negative who was healthy before she took HAART, strongly suggests that profound paradigm shifts are urgently needed to avoid more human rights violations.”

Drs. Maniotis and Richards are available for immediate media interviews and talk show appearances:

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By KAROL SIKORA - More by this author » Last updated at 23:57pm on 21st November 2007

Billions of pounds were spent telling us we were ALL at risk from Aids. But as scientists now admit the threat was overblown, Britain's top cancer expert attacks the political correctness that influences too much medical spending.

Medical care should always be geared to the saving and protecting of lives. Compassion in the face of any type of human suffering should be at its core.

But sadly, the vicissitudes of political correctness can dictate medical priorities.

Certain diseases become fashionable in the public consciousness and so attract more political support and attention.

A classic example of this pattern is HIV/Aids. When this burst on the scene in Britain in the early Eighties, it became the biggest health issue facing the country, over-riding all other medical problems.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 4, 2007 Rethinking AIDS Objects to New Yorker Article Misrepresenting Serious Concerns About HIV Drugs in South Africa SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2007--Rethinking AIDS, an international organization of more than 2,300 scientists, medical doctors, journalists, health advocates and business professionals, said today that an article published in The New Yorker of March 12, 2007, distorted the views of scientists who raise critical questions about AIDS in South Africa, and misrepresented key facts about the South African government’s response to its health crisis. In response, RA, through its media contact given below, is making several of its board members available for media interviews. RA’s board includes medical doctors and scientists with extensive experience working in Africa as well as in pharmaceutical development, public health, infectious disease and diagnostics. The article by Michael Specter, titled “The Denialists,” appeared one year after Celia Farber’s controversial article in Harper’s Magazine, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science,” exposed problems with HIV drug safety and testing practices in Africa and the U.S. In an e-mail leaked to the public, Specter stated that he in fact planned his article as a response to Farber’s. Specter’s article cited claims made by the Treatment Action Committee, a pharmaceutical-supported AIDS drug advocacy group in South Africa, which, together with HIV researcher Dr. Robert Gallo condemned the Harper’s report as “denialism.” RA’s point-by-point rebuttal to their claims of numerous errors in Harper’s found all facts correct and all conclusions consistent and justified. (Suite)

Press Release
March 7, 2007

Rethinking AIDS Asks BBC to Reject Call to Censor
BBC Documentary About Forced Drug Experiments on Children

SAN FRANCISCO, March 7, 2007--Rethinking AIDS, a global organization of more than 2,300 scientists, medical doctors, journalists, health advocates, and business professionals, asked the BBC today to reject a call for censorship of the 2004 documentary film Guinea Pig Kids. The film, coproduced with NDR, German public television, exposed drug experiments on poor, mostly Latino and African-American New York City children presumed to be HIV positive, conducted at Incarnation Children's Center (ICC) in Manhattan.

In a March 7, 2007, letter to the acting chair of the BBC Trust, RA president Dr. Etienne de Harven wrote, "Thanks to the BBC exposé and other investigative reports in the U.S. and Europe, the disturbing practices at the ICC came to the attention of human rights organizations and local government agencies, prompting hearings, investigations and media coverage that continue to this day."

On January 10, 2007, several AIDS researchers sent a complaint letter to the BBC asking it to remove "editorial support," which includes a transcript of the film, from the BBC Web site and that an apology for "false and misleading" portrayal of the children as "guinea pigs" be posted in its place. The documentary investigators found, however, information from ICC’s own former Web site, as well as the Web site of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), indicating that ICC used children to test not only unusually high numbers of highly toxic drugs (mixtures of up to eight drugs) but also at doses that were significantly higher than normal. (See also, the BBC’s follow-up story.)

RA has urged the BBC to "refuse censorship of this vitally important film, continuing the courageous stance that led to the pursuit of this story." It requested that coverage of Guinea Pig Kids remain on the BBC Web site and that no apology be issued for what is an accurate report.

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Does AIDS exist? Is HIV actually a virus? Incredibly, not everyone says yes. But never before has a scientific theory on HIV been tested like this in a court of law. In this landmark SA case, the verdict will decide if a man convicted of infecting his girlfriend with the virus can walk free. Hendrik Gout reports.

TWENTY years ago Andre Chad Parenzee arrived in South Australia from Cape Town, South Africa. He was just 15 years old as he settled into his strange new country. He went to school. He grew up. He become a chef and settled in Port Pirie, the state's fourth-largest city, known less for its fine restaurants than its lead smelters and industrial plants. The future looked good -- until 1998, when he had a blood test.

He was told he carried the human immunodeficiency virus, commonly called HIV.

He told his fiancée he had cancer, and she believed him. They married. He often had sex with her, unprotected sex, knowing he had been diagnosed with the virus. And then he had sex with two other women.

Of course, he had a reason, which was good enough for him. "It was just the fact that I didn't know how she would react to me telling her. I thought she would leave me like everyone else," he said.

And leave him she eventually did, because Parenzee's secret stayed secret no more. It happened after one of the three women had her blood tested as well. To her horror, she found she now also carried signs of the virus. In came the Director of Public Prosecutions. In came the Supreme Court. And in came the jury's verdict: "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" to three counts of endangering lives. Fifteen years, went the judge's gavel.

That was last year. This year, Parenzee, 35, is arguing for leave to appeal on the grounds that AIDS doesn't exist, and that neither does HIV. So if it doesn't exist he should be free to walk and continue to have sex - without warning his partners. Parenzee sits impassively in the dock, staring into the middle distance, stroking his goatee. If the chef understands the scientific arguments raging around him -- and because of him - about retroviruses, blots, mathematical deviations, and statistics, then his face doesn't show it.

This is believed to be the first case in any jurisdiction, in any court, in any country, where AIDS itself is on trial.

That's why the eyes of the world are now on the handsome sandstone Court of Criminal Appeal in central Adelaide, where a red-robed, horsehair wigged-judge, His Honour John Sulan, is deciding whether there is enough scientific controversy about the existence of HIV and AIDS to give Parenzee another shot at freedom.

Now it may seem that 25 million dead are some sort of proof. That's how many people are alleged to have died of AIDS-related causes in the past 25 years. And the toll keeps rising exponentially. It's now three million a year, victims of what could be the greatest mass epidemic of all time. Could all these corpses really be lying?

Yes, say experts. Not all experts, of course, but enough to occupy the witness box at District Court for the past week. That's right -- experts arguing in a court of law that unprotected vaginal intercourse with a suspected HIV carrier is safe. In fact, the climax of Tuesday's testimony was an exchange between prosecutor Sandi McDonald and defence witness Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos. "Would you have unprotected vaginal sex with a HIV-positive man?" asked McDonald. "Any time," replied Papadopulos-Eleopulos.

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HIV/Aids campaigners are circulating "misconceptions" about who is at risk, a former World Health Organization expert has warned.

Dr James Chin was head of a WHO Global Programme on Aids unit from 1987-1992.

In a new book, he says people in the general population outside Africa are unlikely to contract HIV/Aids, as it is restricted to certain high-risk groups.

Campaigners have promoted a message of safer sex which involves the use of condoms for protection.

UK experts said Dr Chin's views were inaccurate, and misrepresented current thinking among HIV/Aids bodies.

Dr Chin says HIV prevalence is low in most populations throughout the world and can be expected to remain low.

He believes this is not because of effective HIV prevention work, but because infection rates are limited by the numbers in groups whose behaviour puts them at high risk.

Dr Chin says it is only in sub-Saharan Africa, where unprotected sex outside marriage is common, that the risk of heterosexual HIV transmission is high.

In other parts of the world, he says HIV is seen only in men who have sex with other men, intravenous drug users and female sex workers.

And he says that, unless the clients or partners of people in these groups also indulge in high-risk behaviour, the virus will not spread.


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Press Release

19 Dec. 2006

New AIDS Study is Flawed and Biased
Scientists Say There's No Proof Taking AIDS Drugs is Better Than Taking Nothing

Responding to a study on AIDS drugs published in the Nov. 30, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), scientists from the non-profit public interest group Rethinking AIDS* (RA) state the trial's conclusions are flawed and that the idea that AIDS drug interruptions are dangerous is based on unproven assumptions. According to Dr. Etienne de Harven, a pioneer in virology research and electron microscopy and President of RA, “The NEJM study does not provide evidence that taking AIDS drugs is better than not taking them. Unfortunately, incorrect conclusions drawn by the study's authors, 14 of whom recieve some form of monetary compensation from manufacturers of AIDS drugs, have been repeated in the media and touted by a number of AIDS organizations.”

In the NEJM paper, about half of the participants were assigned to take antiretroviral drugs continuously, while the others stopped taking drugs when the number of CD4 immune cells in their blood rose above a certain level (350 per cubic millimeter), and resumed taking drugs when CD4 counts dropped below 250. The study's authors concluded that people interrupting antiretroviral therapy were 2.5 times more likely to die or become ill from AIDS diseases and were also 70 per cent more likely to develop “non-AIDS-related” events such as heart, kidney or liver problems. Based on these findings, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases which funded the study, concluded that “doctors should no longer offer treatment breaks without at least monitoring the amount of virus circulating in a patient's blood. ‘I think for practical purposes, it is the end’ of treatment interruptions.”

 (Suite)