July 8, 2002

LETTER FROM SOUTH AFRICA

UNITED NATIONS SHOCK HORROR ON AIDS

SELLING THE MOTHER OF ALL DISEASES

By Anita Allen

The biggest international health event last week was the release of the latest UNAIDS report on the global HIV epidemic.

The organization’s CEO, Dr. Peter Piot, said the world was gripped by what was "undeniably the deadliest epidemic in history". (1) This may be a case of many a true pun said in jest, because what Piot is asking us to believe in is a 100% fatal germ that never runs out of new victims and causes a disease which has been so defined as to make it impossible to be cured.

In short, HIV/AIDS defies the principles of science to outwit billions of years of evolution. Is anything more deadly than that?

Piot stated that in the next 20 years AIDS "will kill 68 million people in the 45 worst affected countries". In those same countries his organisation estimates annual mortality from malaria to be 1.7 - 2.7 million people - which means that only one of the 30-odd diseases under the Bangui definition of AIDS "opportunistic infections" could kill 54 million people in 20 years.

The question is: Does malaria get added twice - once as malaria and then again as AIDS and how does one decide? And ditto for all the other 30-odd diseases making up the syndrome - the "s" in AIDS?

What everyone must understand is what Piot is selling is the Mother of All Diseases (MAD).

The UNAIDS report’s subtitle: "The Barcelona Report", marks it as a public relations exercise planned to coincide with the 14th International Aids Conference in Barcelona, Spain, that opened yesterday July 7 and runs through to 12 July.

What the report does is use doomsday statistics based mostly on undisclosed sources as a springboard to justify at very least a $10 billion annual increase to global AIDS funds. In other words, Piot, his colleagues and partners want to continue on a larger scale as they have for the past 20 years.

By his own admission, Piot wants the money to buy not all drugs - just those aimed at HIV. The rest of the money is to set up more dispensaries and train more personnel to hand out the antiretrovirals which even the manufacturers state in their package instructions cannot halt the replication of HIV.

My reaction to the UNAIDS report was "déjà vu." Piot released a similar shock horror report on the carefully orchestrated road show to the last International Aids Conference in 2000. South Africans know all about this series of conferences, the 13^th one having taken place in Durban exactly two years ago at the same venue where this week the African Union will be signed into being.

The conferences run under the auspices of the International Aids Society (IAS), founded by the late Jonathan Mann, a HIV/AIDS foundation member and a director of the NIH’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, whose graduates serve all over the world. (2)) At Durban 2000 IAS was supported by UNAIDS, the Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS and The International Council of AIDS Services Organisations. Of the 18 principal and major sponsors of the conference, 11 were drug companies (Abbott Laboratories, Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Glaxo Wellcome, DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company, Merck Sharp and Dohme, Roche, Pharmacia Upjohn, Trimeris, and Bayer Diagnostics). Four were IT companies (Microsoft, Dimension Data, Cisco Systems and DellCom); two were major foundations (Gilead Sciences and Ford Foundation), as well as the South African Department of Health which contributed about R6 million, and the US National Institutes of Health.

Additional sponsors included the European Commission, Harvard AIDS Institute, WHO, and the University of California.

Thousands of delegates attend these biannual get-togethers as all expenses paid junkets to what is effectively a drug cartel jamboree. At Durban 2000 protease inhibitors were the new thing. At Barcelona it is a new class integrase inhibitors which are going to be even more expensive than existing models and manufacturers will only go as far as saying "may interrupt the HIV lifecycle" (3). This information came in the same press kit sent to the world’s media as Piot’s Barcelona Report statement.

Included in the IAS/UNAIDS conference freebies are the media - 350 of them were buzzed in to Durban2000 courtesy of organisations like the Henry J Kaiser Foundation and the International Physicians in AIDS Care (IAPAC).

In 2000, the conference took place while South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki was being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of vilification because he convened a panel consisting of scientists and health care professionals from all sides of the AIDS Debate. UNAIDS’ representative on the panel was Dr Awa Coll-Seck, who told a press conference I attended at Durban 2000 that the reason why there was a vast discrepancy between UNAIDS and WHO estimates of AIDS orphans was because the former defined AIDS orphans as any child who had lost one or both parents for any reason, whereas the latter defined it as a child who lost one or both parents due to AIDS (that is all 30-odd diseases under the Banqui definition - TB, malaria, leprosy, STD’s, dysentery, Hepatitis, meningitis, pneumonia - even cervical cancer - which if you think about it is the opposite of the cell death caused by a virus.

At Durban 2000, Mbeki and his predecessor Nelson Mandela were pitted against each other. Mbeki opened the conference and much to the disappointment of the HIV/AIDS lobby pointedly avoided declaring HIV the cause of AIDS. Mandela wasn’t so reticent and said he personally believed this to be so. He referred to a stage that had been reached when none was entirely right or entirely wrong and called on everyone to put aside the rhetoric and to work together to solve the outstanding issues (4). That has not yet happened and Mandela has since added to the rhetoric by coming out totally in favour of antiretrovirals with no fear about their safety or expressing any doubts of their efficacy. At the same time he keeps insisting that Mbeki is a honourable albeit young man for holding the alternate view. Whatever the eventual outcome, one of them is going to be right.

At the moment the big money seems to be on Mandela, who is due to close the Barcelona conference as well, in a double bill with former US president Bill Clinton. I can hardly wait to hear what this US symbol of safe sex might have to say.

Making it two-for-price-of-one is Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, who is due to speak on "Reversing Development: HIV/AIDS Impact". Getting top billing are all the usual suspects from Durban 2000, notably Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, and Helene Gayle, whose chosen topic is "Prevention Now! A Vision For The Future". Somehow I don’t think her vision will include the need to make sure about the science before acting. But maybe she will explain why around the world condom distribution rises in direct proportion with HIV positive test results.

Gayle, a former director at the CDC has been seconded to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There she works, with among others, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, channelling funds into breaking the silence by telling children they are infected with "the deadliest virus in history" and feeding them antiretrovirals, courtesy of Microsoft consumers across the globe, including me.

Hence the truism that HIV/AIDS affects everyone.

Also on the Barcelona presentations list is South Africa’s most distinguished HIV positive person Judge Edwin Cameron, of South Africa’s Appeal Court and acting judge of the Constitutional Court. At Durban 2000 he gave the opening Jonathan Mann Memorial lecture. He spoke openly about being homosexual, HIV positive for 12 years and taking a daily regimen of AZT/3TC/Nevirapine for three years before Nevirapine was licensed in this country, which he described as an "almost miraculous new combination drug treatment".

"It is a fact," Cameron stated during his impersonation of a drug PRO, "that over the last half-decade, various aggregations of drug types, some old some new, have been shown when taken in combination to quell the replication of the virus within the body."

The speakers immediately after him saw it differently:

 

 

1. "Even combinations of five drugs do not seem able to eliminate the virus from the host," said Roy M Anderson, from UNAIDS Collaborating Centre for Epidemiological Research, Wellcome Trust Centre, University of Oxford;

    

    

    

2. Given the anti-retroviral agents currently available, it is now clear that eradication of HIV is not possible," said Anthony S Fauci, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

    

These IAS/UNAIDS conferences are used to publicize early results from clinical trials. At Durban 2000, one "new" approach that got an airing was "interrupted drug regimens". This must not be confused with "drug holidays" which every researcher agrees leads to drug resistant strains of HIV and has to be avoided at all costs. In a corridor after his presentation, I asked Dr Mauro Schechter from Brazil how the virus was able to tell whether it was a "drug holiday" or an "interrupted regimen". His English suddenly failed him and he couldn’t understand what I was asking.

Another presentation which had some rolling in the isles showed that HIV increases sexual desire in its host. According to the US researchers from the University of California-Berkeley, infection with HIV could make men more amorous, which could make them more likely to pass on the virus. The team said they were checking out one of the basic premises behind natural selection - that organisms which happen to create conditions favourable to themselves will out-compete other organisms and thus become more numerous.

"From an evolutionary perspective, HIV would benefit by influencing its human host to increase sexual activity," Philip Starks et al said in their presentation at the conference. (5) The conclusion was based on claimed "elevated levels of testosterone in early stages of infection in HIV positive males", they said. Clearly, anything goes in HIV/AIDS!

A lack of intellectual vigor is the hallmark of the AIDS debate with proponents of HIV/AIDS continuing to insist everyone take their word for it, while producing little by way of evidence and shutting down any debate.

Electron microscopy evidence of HIV is one of these omissions. The only picture of HIV at Durban 2000 was a slide included in a presentation by US media darling Dr David Ho. I will never know if the bloated image I saw for a few moments was the devilishly sly phantom that no scientist has yet been able to separate out of cellular debris. The reason is that Ho’s presentation was the only one not available in hardcopy to the media, because the disc on which it was stored could not be opened. A case of Ho-ho-ho?

The most visible and persistent rent-a-crowd at Durban 2000 was ACT-UP - a coalition with a "relationship" with pharmaceutical giant Merck, Sharp and Dohme, as Jeffrey Sturchio, executive director of public affairs for Asia and Africa suggested to me after having allowed ACT-UP to plaster his company’s stand with graffiti demanding more and cheaper drugs for Africa.

Boehringer Ingelheim staff froze when ACT-UP did the same thing to its stand. I caught up with them as they stood around smoking in a no-smoking hall. "We are HIV positive," they replied when I asked them why they were flouting South African law.

"So, if the HIV doesn't get you then lung cancer will and you will be yet another AIDS-related statistic, along with all those made ill by their toxic smoke clouds? Can't you see your hypocrisy?" I asked them in clear tautology.

ACT-UP’s affiliate in South Africa Treatment Action Campaign denies direct funding from pharmaceuticals, whatever that means. At the opening of Durban 2000 members of TAC and its staunch ally here in South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Medecins sans Frontieres, marched alongside a banner proclaiming: "One dissident, one bullet". None of them saw anything wrong with the infamous slogan from the Apartheid past though it has been universally condemned in its original form "One settler, one bullet".

Nevertheless it was allowed with no comment from any media in its application to rebels against HIV-causes-AIDS orthodoxy. (6)

And so it goes, on and on.

REFERENCES

1. Peter Piot for Reuters, picked up by The Star, Johannesburg. "Aids Action: Too little too late?" 3 July 2002

2. The Star, Johannesburg. "How new drugs may be able to interrupt HIV lifecycle" lifted from Reuters. 3 July 2002.

3. Duesberg, Peter. "Inventing the Aids Virus". Regnery Publishing Inc (1996) pg 135

4. www.gov.za 13TH INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE DURBAN Closing Address by the Former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela 14 July 2000.

5. Also reported in The Star, Johannesburg, 12 July 2000. "HIV increases sexual desire" from Reuters.

6. Mail & Guardian, 14 to 20 July 2000, pg 8.