|
Progressive Local News |
Front Page |
Viewpoints |
Subscribe |
Portlanders came together for a series of conferences in early June to discuss the plight of Africa, including the toll AIDS is taking on that continent. While everyone agrees Africans are suffering and dying, some question the diagnosis. The following is part of an Alliance series looking at AIDS.
By Kim Stephenson
If HIV is transmitted easily through heterosexual sex, as the enormous South African HIV/AIDS figures declare, why have United States heterosexual transmission numbers always remained minuscule? Maybe Africans have sex differently and have lots more of it-those savage beasts!
This racist and offensive notion is all that we have to ponder when comparing the current figures of heterosexual HIV infection: 28 million South Africans to 3,678 Americans. Doesn't it seem a little odd in comparison? Mainstream AIDS scientists, administrators and journalists give us no explanation nor do they seem to question why the epidemiology of Sub-Saharan Africa (and what about the rest of Africa?) is so drastically different from the United States or any other country.
Statistics pouring out of the Center for Disease Control, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization are never questioned and they appear to be the cause of the chasm. In Africa you do not need to be HIV infected or tested to be classified as having HIV or AIDS. You need only suffer from diarrhea or fevers for more than one month, and weight loss of ten percent or greater. It is poverty that is killing Africans, not sex.
Africa and the purported heterosexual AIDS epidemic is just one piece to a giant jigsaw puzzle of unproven, slippery science and cowardly, unchallenging journalism that has produced and sustained a multi-billion dollar infrastructure known as the AIDS epidemic.
This is the first in a series of articles for The Alliance that briefly outline the myriad questions, issues, statistics and theories regarding the AIDS epidemic. This first article will address AIDS and Africa. Subsequent articles will discuss the scientific specifics and statistics of HIV sexual transmission; describe to the best of our ability what HIV is, how it was discovered and the validity of HIV testing; discuss the phenomenon of court seizure of "HIV positive" children from their mothers after women refuse to give AZT to their children, and discuss long-term, non-drug-taking AIDS survivors. The final article will give voice to dissident scientific theories about the cause of AIDS.
Portland recently hosted several South African speakers from June 12-14 to discuss how the enormous debt Africa owes to the United States for past "humanitarian help" is contributing to the AIDS crisis. Like other Third World countries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have Africa bound and buried in debt it can never repay.
"Africa owes $380 billion to multinational corporations," said Nunu Kidane, program director for Inter-national Devel-opment Exchange in San Francisco. "These are debts that were made illegitimately and under murky circumstances. We want what is rightfully ours!" Kidane said passionately. "We want to reclaim the land that is ours!"
The speakers stressed that it is difficult to gain headway in African healthcare when one-third of Africa's gross national product leaves the country to service debts, one of which was "humanitarian" aid for the 1984 famine. The General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Molefe Samuel Tsele, vented his frustration with American drug companies.
"We are held hostage to the drug companies who hold the licenses to the drugs people need. AIDS policy is strengthening drug companies; the stock goes as high as the number of people with AIDS in Africa."
An audience member asked if anyone had looked into the connection between drug companies promoting anti-AIDS drugs and the groups generating the AIDS statistics, and the idea that Africans could be suffering from diseases other than AIDS. Kidane replied that it didn't matter, that people were dying and that AIDS must be a new disease.
But the way HIV/AIDS is defined in Africa, it most assuredly is not a new disease(s). The result is that we are treating malaria, tuberculosis, parasitic infections and the effects of malnutrition, unclean drinking and bathing water with multi-million dollar condom campaigns.
African AIDS statistics are coming from UNAIDS, a massive umbrella organization that includes The World Bank, the United Nations Drug Control Program, the World Health Organization (WHO) and five other large international organizations. It seems a conflict of interest to have the same organization both produce HIV/AIDS statistics and receive billions of dollars to "fight the disease."
The BBC recently reported UNAIDS figures that AIDS will kill one in two Africans, and the United Nations has therefore called for a "massive increase in funding." The World Bank AIDS website states there are 25 million Africans currently living with AIDS, with 15,000 new infections daily; therefore the World Bank is "giving $500 billion of no interest loans to developing countries."
When astounding figures such as 25-28 million current South African HIV infections (organizational estimates usually differ by the millions), 40 million current HIV infections worldwide and 100 million expected deaths from AIDS in the next decade, one would assume and hope such horrifying figures are derived from reliable methods, but they are not. For instance, health officials have not performed 28 million ELISA or Western Blot tests in Africa in the past year.
HIV/AIDS statistics in Africa are derived from guess-timates the WHO compiles using the "Bangui Definition" of AIDS and a handful of HIV positive tests from pregnant African women that are exponentially exploded.
The Bangui Definition was created in 1985 at the WHO conference in the Central African Republic because doctors felt an urgent need to begin to estimate the size and spread of HIV/AIDS. There was no diagnostic test for widespread use at the time but doctors needed a clinical case definition. Two physicians, Joseph McCor-mick and Susan Fisher-Hoch, produced what is called the "Bangui Definiton" of AIDS in Africa, which says an adult or adolescent 12 years old or greater is considered to have AIDS if he or she exhibits two or more major signs plus one minor sign. Major signs include 1) weight loss of at least ten percent of body weight; 2) diarrhea for at least one month; 3) fever for at least one month (intermittent or constant). Minor signs are 1) oropharyngeal candidiasis; 2) pruritic skin rash; 3) a history of herpes zoster; 4) generalized lymphadenopathy; 5) cough for at least one month (without TB); 6) chronic ulcerated herpes simplex; 7) tuberculosis.
In a country ravaged by imperialism, drought, civil wars, dictators and widespread destitution these symptoms are not unusual, which is why many Africans say AIDS stands for the "American Idea for Discouraging Sex."
Any type of health statistic is difficult to come by in a country where there is little-to no health care and HIV tests are expensive. The "known" HIV positives coming from the WHO are taken from a small sampling of leftover blood samples drawn from pregnant women who visit STD clinics. This blood is given only one ELISA test and often it results in a false positive because when a person's immune system is low, the antibodies produced in response also react with HIV proteins. (HIV tests recognize HIV proteins, which is the closest science can come to the virus itself.) In the United States, if a person tests positive for one ELISA test, at least one or two more ELISA tests are done and also a Western Blot test, which is more reliable and expensive.
These "known African positives" are then put into a Geneva-based machine that grinds the number through "a complicated formula that explodes out the number." There are many assumptions in the formula including the sexual behavior of the pregnant woman and the "well-known natural course of HIV infection."
Even death statistics are hard to come by in Africa, and when someone does dig them up country by country, as South African journalist Rian Malan did, numbers do not jive. He found that African deaths have actually dropped in the era of AIDS.
The near impossibility to get medical information combined with the ambiguous definition of AIDS made Africa ripe to destroy the stigma that AIDS was only a disease of homosexual men. Doctors wanted to refute the ugly moralism of the early 80s, and they wanted financial and political support to fight AIDS. Africa was and is assigned a central role in the premise that "AIDS is an equal opportunity destroyer" and that "AIDS does not discriminate" by making it a heterosexually transmitted disease.
There are two camps devoted to the explanation of why HIV/AIDS remains confined to relatively small groups of homosexual men and intravenous drug users everywhere else but Africa. One camp says Africa is our future and the epidemic hasn't hit yet, even though we have been waiting 20 years. The other camp says Africans are substantially more promiscuous and are more likely to have genital ulcers, but it doesn't make sense when researching the studies of heterosexual transmission (the next article).
Racist myths about the sexual excesses of Afri-cans are as old as imperialism, and affronts to our Victorian sensibilities are penalized with Western sexual mores that translate into social control. During International AIDS Conferences doctors claim AIDS could be brought under control if Africans could only restrain their sexual cravings. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being channeled through white, Western infrastructures to promote condoms, abstinence and monogamy in a culture that is not based in Judeo-Christian guilt. Even homo-hating Senator Jesse Helms approves of the campaign and recently rushed $200 million overseas as part of an anti-terrorism package. Last April the United States government declared AIDS a threat to national security, which means more governmental/political control in the realm of science.
Africa has long suffered from malaria and tuberculosis, and the diseases have grown resistant to conventional drugs. Malaria kills about two million people per year, roughly the same as alleged AIDS deaths per year, yet malaria receives a fraction of the funding. Tuberculosis kills about 1.7 million people per year and is also brushed aside to the extent no new TB drugs have been developed for four years.
The AIDS epidemic is built on the holy trinity of journalism: blood, sex and money. Until Sept. 11, levels of AIDS funding grew daily as foundations and philanthropists rushed to ease the "merciless plague of biblical virulence." America's heartstrings are pulled daily with stories of millions of orphans and whole families slowly wasting away, but if we want to help Africa, are condom campaigns the best pursuit?
Kim Stephenson is a freelance writer and regular contributor to the Alliance
Front Page |
Contact |
Subscribe |