CAPITOL IDEAS: The AIDS Scandal That Won't Quit
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHEL!. The AIDS Scandal That Never Quits NTHONY FAUCI has directed the Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases almost since AIDS began. It is a part of the...
...The whole thing is a crock...
...Fauci had said that when HIV tests are conducted in Africa, they confirm the Bangui-based estimates...
...Like Fauci, he has been a major player in the AIDS story from the beginning...
...What this means is that traditional African diseases, common in areas with a tropical climate, open latrines and contaminated water, are now called something else: AIDS...
...The World Health Organization's cumulative total of clinically confirmed AIDS cases in Africa through 2001 is 1.09 million...
...A Rolling Stone investigation could find no evidence of excess deaths in South Africa...
...Most Africans lack access to safe drinking water, over 60 percent have no sanitation...
...It always has been a major embarrassment that AIDS is predominantly male...
...Human and animal excrement find their way into the water supply...
...He pointed out that NIH has 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 now abandoned its earlier recommendation that HIV positive patients be "hit early, hit hard...
...He added that when HIV testing is done (e.g...
...He was actually at Bangui for the 1985 conference...
...South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki has been under tremendous pressure to administer nevirapine to the babies of women found to be "HIV positive" when pregnant...
...He told me he had spent his entire career at NIAID...
...The far higher numbers routinely bandied about are simply guesses generated by the Bangui definition and validated by gullible journalists pushing photographs of thin men lying on cots...
...A recent discussion with an aide to a US...
...Liver failure is the primary cause of death for American and European AIDS patients [who obediently take the drugs], even though liver disease is not one of the AIDS defining diseases...
...Fever for a month...
...Real infectious diseases aren't supposed to work that way...
...senator shed some light on what is really going on...
...is confident that what Africans who meet the Bangui criteria more than anything need is the latest high-tech drugs such as protease inhibitors...
...To avoid having to label it a "gay disease," a new slogan was confected: "We are all at risk" The fact is that heterosexual transmission of the virus is almost impossible...
...D. David Steele, an attorney in the Bay Area, recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of a plaintiff who was routinely treated with the drug after puncturing his finger with a stray needle...
...As a result, he could be counted as an AIDS case by the Bangui definition...
...It is a part of the Hydra-headed thing called the National Institutes for Health...
...What are the major symptoms...
...It was a Saturday morning and he was wearing a shiny black jacket, but he was easily recognizable from his frequent television appearances...
...Centers for Disease Control...
...a U.S...
...It's worth noting that Mark Schoof, a Village Voice reporter (since hired by the WallStreetJournal), spent months in Africa in 1999 working on AIDS and won the Pulitzer Prize for his series...
...The fact is heterosexual transmission of the disease is almost impossible...
...Altman failed to disclose that AIDS could now be diagnosed without an HIV test, and he hasn't mentioned it since...
...What about the "20 million orphans" we read about...
...Recently I interviewed Dr...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor ofThe American Spectator...
...But in sub-Saharan Africa, they don't have to do the test...
...She is the director of Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, based in Los Angeles...
...If you see a doctor, and you have certain symptoms, the authorities can count you as an "HIV-AIDS" case...
...Of course, big money is involved—$15 billion over the next five years from US...
...Nancy Padian's study of 450 heterosexual couples with one infected partner showed no new infections after ten years...
...If one parent is dead or "missing" then their children can be called "orphans...
...Some years ago, although healthy, she was misleadingly diagnosed as "HIV positive...
...The drug causes liver failure...
...But then along comes African AIDS with its convenient local definition—and seeming evidence that AIDS is evenly divided between the sexes...
...The "Bangui definition" of African AIDS was duly reported in Science and in one or two medical journals, but it has not yet been reported by our major newspapers...
...Diagnosis without a test is done "more for economic reasons than anything else," he said...
...That idea was pushed by AIDS researcher David Ho, Time's 1996 "Man of the Year...
...In South Africa, where conditions are above the African average, poor people may be reduced to scooping up drinking water from puddles...
...He is himself a former public health officer and worked for the CDC before joining the Times...
...health-care worker with a needle-stick accident required a liver transplant after taking nevirapine...
...Yet AIDS, Inc...
...taxpayers...
...He wrote the first AIDS article, in 1981...
...He does the bidding of the gay lobby...
...A biochemist who holds patents on protease-type drugs, he is a member of Mbeki's AIDS Advisory Panel...
...He wrote a big story for the Times, filling an entire inside page, with a "box" on the Bangui meeting...
...Think about that...
...They don't test for the virus itself...
...They don't do it because the test is so expensive," Fauci said...
...They do not 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 CAPITOL IDEAS specifically identify HIV antibodies," says Christine Maggiore...
...But there's something else...
...And he is still on the case...
...But Senator Kennedy was indignant that these hearings were held at all...
...Heterosexual transmission is politically imperative to them...
...But the problem is that HIV tests react to lots of other conditions in addition to HIV...
...I bumped into him not long ago at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C...
...I told him I had heard that in Africa you don't need an HIV test to be diagnosed with AIDS...
...The conditions that produce false positives are abundant in African countries...
...But it merely reported on a new "hospital surveillance system to determine the extent of AIDS...
...First developed as cancer chemotherapy, the suit claims that doctors failed to warn of AZT's potential toxic effects...
...What about the "pandemic" that is "ravaging Africa," at least in the headlines...
...Rasnick said: "In the past twenty years, the population of sub-Saharan Africa has increased by 274 million people, almost equal to the population of the United States...
...The drugs used to treat AIDS patients are hazardous, he said...
...weight loss of ten percent...
...A persistent cough is another...
...Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama recently held hearings on the greater likelihood that HIV in Africa is transmitted by dirty needles in rundown hospitals and clinics...
...She provides the following rebuttal: "The antibody tests detect certain proteins that are not unique or specific to HIV antibodies and that may correspond to antibodies produced in response to over 60 conditions including colds, flu, immunizations, herpes, hepatitis, blood transfusions, parasites, TB, malaria and even pregnancy...
...Worse, the AIDS establishment has suppressed a decade of mounting evidence about just how dangerous these drugs are...
...The principal culprit has been Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times...
...The conference was organized by the U.S...
...David Rasnick, also in the Bay Area...
...They test for antibodies to it...
...This key relaxation of what "AIDS" means in Africa was worked out at a 1985 conference in Bangui, in the Central African Republic...
...It's important to remember that AIDS is defined as about 25 pre-existing diseases in conjunction with a "positive" test for antibodies to the human immunodeficiencyvirus...
...Since AIDS hit the headlines his agency's budget has soared, and he deserves no little credit for that...
...on pregnant women in pre-natal clinics in South Africa) the estimated HIV-infection rate is confirmed...
...and prolonged diarrhea...
...While in Africa he contracted malaria...
...We'll leave aside that this hypothesis imputes gross promiscuity to Africans...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
