VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
DEBATING AZT
Appendix I
When we consider upon what ludicrous evidence the
most preposterous beliefs have been easily, and by millions, entertained, we
may well hesitate before pronouncing anything incredible.
-- The Last Days of Hitler
Hugh Trevor-Roper
In the preamble to his
response to my article AZT: A Medicine
from Hell, top HIV honcho Des Martin floats some scary statistics about HIV
infection rates - all terrific fund-raising stuff. It will come as an awkward
disappointment, no doubt, to those whose careers thrive on such numbers, to be
confronted with The World Health Report
1998. It records that “using the latest data gathered and validated by
WHO”, in 1996 South Africa had a magnificent 729 AIDS cases - of a population
of 40 odd million. A few years ago our experts predicted 200 000 AIDS orphans
by 1997 in KwaZulu-Natal, my province. Guess how many children were reported
orphaned here in total over the period 1996/7 (car-crashes, whatever) according
to our national Department of Welfare’s current Annual Statistical Report:
- a whopping 971. Some epidemic! One
could go on trotting out similar spectacular flops, but suffice it to say that
nowhere on the planet has a single prediction of AIDS exploding into and
decimating the general population ever come to pass. No demographic data
anywhere speak to an “AIDS epidemic.” Scrutinised, AIDS statistics always turn
to mush, and it’s when you home in on the “African AIDS” figures that the show
really turns to farce. It’s all computer modeling, premised on the creed that
an HIV-positive test result predicts sickness and death after 8 years or so.
Could it be that there is something wrong with the theory? The public rightly
yawns in reaction to Martin’s silly doomsday histrionics. We’ve noticed that
the ‘experts’ are always postponing their plague with which they menace us for
money and attention. And since the overwhelming majority of HIV-positive people
are healthy, what is this Alice in Wonderland talk of his - this “HIV disease”
in the absence of any AIDS defining illness?
Dr Martin states, “[HIV]
disease is a major global health problem and is associated with a significant
morbidity and mortality.” The Harvard School of Public Health doesn’t think so.
In its encyclopaedic Global Burden of
Disease Study, published in 1996 for the World Health Organization and the
World Bank, it reports that “HIV currently [rates] twenty-eighth in the
rankings…[in the] global pattern of disease burden.” That’s not even close to
accidental falls (14th) or suicide (17th) as causes of
disability, illness and death “for all regions of the world.” What this means
for the ‘everyone is at risk of catching AIDS’ propaganda with which we’re
relentlessly bombarded by scare-mongering AIDS careerists is that in truth
you’re actually twice as likely to succumb in an accidental fall - about as
remote a likelihood as you one day putting a gun to your head.
Consider Uganda, once the
shining sore in African AIDS mythmaking, until Southern Africa was discovered
to be a more lucrative market. Sold to the world as the epicentre of the ‘AIDS
epidemic in Africa’, Uganda was said by the WHO to have a million HIV positives
in 1987, about one in twenty. The same number in 1997, according to several
articles in the Lancet in 1997 and
1998. Aren’t contagious epidemics supposed to follow an exponential bell-curve
increase in case incidence? Because this is what any textbook on epidemiology
will tell you. In December 1998, in its Weekly
Epidemiological Record, the WHO stated the total number of Ugandan AIDS
cases (not deaths) cumulatively since 1993 to be 55 201. (Bear in mind that in
Africa, under the Bangui AIDS case definition, any number of common maladies
can be recast as AIDS cases presumptively; you don’t even need an HIV-positive
test result.) On the popular premise that AIDS takes you on average about 10
years after HIV infection, one might reasonably enquire where are the expected
500 000 dead? UNAIDS tells us - as a boasted triumph of health educational
programmes advocating condom use - that the HIV-positive incidence rate among
urban Ugandan women has dropped from about 40% to about 15%. So where are the
mass graves of the lost 25%? Or are these women still around, hale and hearty,
as the absence of any empirical evidence that Uganda has lost a quarter of its
city-women to AIDS diseases would suggest? The exterminated villages of
AIDS-lore, my Ugandan friend Denis Rugege explains simply, are deserted
homesteads besieged by that timeless enemy, malaria, resurgent when general
disease resistance is weakened in times of civil strife, infrastructural
collapse and widespread hunger. And no one should need reminding what trauma
Uganda has been through in recent decades.
Some contrary guys
unimpressed by ‘the overwhelming evidence’ think that AIDS in our time is best
construed as an epidemic of mass hysteria, rather than any conventional disease
phenomenon. And that it is destined to pass rather like neurasthenia, the
wandering womb, and hysteria among others in the olden days, to oblivion, as
inevitably as that other dumb contemporary craze, ‘attention deficit disorder.’
After all, Professor Luc Montagnier himself notes that “AIDS has no typical
symptoms.” Odd that. A disease as elastic as medical vogues and funding
contingencies require.
For instance, if you’ve got
tuberculosis and you’re HIV-negative you’ve just got tuberculosis, and really,
who gives a damn? Who pays a mortgage and makes a career attending lushly
sponsored overseas conferences to jabber excitedly about something as
politically unsexy as TB? We have a hundred and twenty five TB cases here for
every ‘AIDS’ case according to the WHO’s best data, but did you ever hear our
AIDS activist crowd say a word about TB and the miserable social conditions
that always hover about it? If you’ve got TB, and your blood contains arbitrary
levels of certain proteins claimed to be produced by your immune system as
antibodies specifically(#) to defeat a virus called HIV, voila, suddenly its not TB anymore, it’s !AIDS! Even if according
to every marker, apart from the test result, the former and latter conditions
are identical on clinical presentation. And even if the presence of antibodies
without more has never before in medicine been deemed sufficient evidence of an
active infection by any pathogen. In South Africa, with your TB rechristened
AIDS, two possibilities arise. If black, you’ll probably be sent away from the
hospital untreated as a lost case on injury time. If white you’ll go on
‘antiretrovirals’ for AIDS - provided you can afford to buy your expensive,
certain and inexorable slide to the mortuary on today’s deadly AIDS drugs.
To illustrate the absurd fluidity of the HIV-AIDS
construct, if the AIDS epidemic predicted by the US Surgeon General fails to
explode into the general population and instead smoulders dismayingly within
its original risk groups, thereby threatening the US Centers for Disease
Control’s glorious funding, just change the definition of AIDS to double its
case incidence by the stroke of a pen. Chuck in invasive cervical cancer in the
presence of HIV antibodies to keep feminist lobbyists happy by including their
occasional malady as an AIDS indicator disease to enable them to pull Federal
health benefits. No matter that it’s hard to imagine what cancer has to do with
immune suppression, the claimed hallmark of AIDS.
Martin’s appalling,
ignorant, death-wish contention that most HIV-positive children will die is not
supported by a single controlled study anywhere. Local AIDS boff Clive Evian
repeats the WHO accepted wisdom that these babies can acquire their mothers’
“HIV antibodies… without being truly HIV-infected”, and over time they
disappear. Around the town in which I live, Pietermaritzburg, some black
children born HIV-positive are sent to die in specially established hospices. Some
born sick in abject poverty fail to thrive and die, however good the care. But
most don’t. Years later they languish there without hope, having missed their
appointments with death set for them by the weird missionary types who run
these joints. Medicine has branded these bright-eyed children carriers of a
vile, filthy, deadly contagion, and they are raised to expect death. The mark
they bear is like the hidden mole in the armpit detected by the inquisition -
meaningless in a sane world, but during an hysterical storm, super-charged with
evil. Perfectly healthy, they are raised as though leprous. Imagine growing up
like that. It’s beyond pitiful.
Just where this notion comes
from that HIV-positive children tend to die is hard to fathom. In 1995, writing
in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Davis et al reported
that “Approximately 14,920 HIV-infected infants were born in the United States
between 1978 and 1993. Of these, an estimated 12,240 children were living at
the beginning of 1994; 26% were younger than 2 years, 35% were aged 2 to 4
years, and 39% were aged 5 years or older.” Which means that over 80% of
children diagnosed HIV-positive at birth are still alive. No prizes for
guessing what drug probably killed the others. On 18 May 1999, Dr. Warren
Naamara, the Kenya adviser for the UNAIDS programme said, “Many HIV-positive
children were now living beyond the usual five years and into their teens,
bringing new challenges in the fight against the HIV/AIDS [and] more children
born with the virus that causes AIDS now survive beyond the age of ten.” To the
chagrin of the ‘AIDS experts’, these children just won’t die on time. How’s
this for another stunning death wish: “The UNAIDS official said the new trend
posed a threat to the management of disease in the five to 14 years age
bracket, which was previously perceived as the hope for the next millennium,
since it was largely free of the disease. Naamara…said HIV-positive children in
sub-Sahara Africa were likely to contribute to the spread of the disease as
most were orphans with no education or skills to derive a livelihood from.”
(per PANA report, 20 May 1999.)
# Specific? In 1990, in the
journal Cancer Research, Strandstrom et al reported that the blood of 72 of
144 healthy dogs tested for HIV antibodies with the Western blot test (the most
‘specific’, many ‘AIDS experts’ say) reacted positively with one or more bands.
Dogs don’t get AIDS. Not even chimps whose DNA is more than 99% homologous with
human DNA, and which are susceptible to all other pathogens causing real infectious diseases in humans.
Notes:
Concerning the biochemical
phenomena said to evidence ‘HIV’, see An
interview with Eleni Papadopulos, by Christine Johnson, 1997:
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/cjinterviewep.htm
About ‘HIV antibody testing’, see Do
antibody tests prove HIV infection? An interview with Valendar Turner, by
Huw Christie, 1997:
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/hcinterviewvt.htm
For a popular introduction to the erection of the HIV-AIDS construct and its
root problems, see A Great Future Behind
It; The Yin and Yang of HIV, by Valendar Turner & Andrew McIntyre,
1999:
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/data/vtyinyang.htm
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE