When Is Enough Enough?

"The proportion of Americans who consider HIV/AIDS to be the "most urgent health problem facing this nation today" has decreased from 38% in 1997 to 17% in 2002." So laments former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) HIV/AIDS director Dr. Harold Jaffe in the August 27 issue of Science. While lauding the U.S. overseas effort, he insists "We must ask ourselves why we, collectively, don't care more about the domestic epidemic."

To a great extent Dr. Jaffe, now with the Department of Public Health at Oxford University in England, literally illustrates why AIDS should be eliciting less concern and funding. In the article's sole graph, he shows new diagnoses peaked a full decade ago and are now barely half the rate as then. Deaths peaked slightly later and have declined about 75 percent.

About 16,000 Americans died from AIDS in 2002, approximately half the number that die annually from flu. Meanwhile, over half a million die from cancer yearly, with the butcher's bill for incurable pancreatic cancer alone about twice that as for AIDS. According to the CDC, 435,000 Americans die each year from tobacco-related disease and another 400,000 from poor diet and lack of exercise. (Though arguably those last two figures are exaggerated.)

What Dr. Jaffe views with alarm actually reflects a decrease in national hysteria. It's obscene that almost a fifth of Americans still consider AIDS our prime health problem when heart disease, which kills 700,000 Americans annually, gets a worry rating of merely eight percent.

Dr. Jaffe valiantly uses a number of hoary old tricks to exaggerate the AIDS problem, but all crumble into dust when exposed to the rays of the sun.

For example instead of comparing deaths from AIDS to other diseases, Dr. Jaffe compares them to war deaths. That's hardly fair since even in the bloodiest days of the Civil War or World War II, disease deaths have vastly outweighed those from combat.

Then he hits us with the one AIDS figure that's actually going up, that of people living with the disease. Yet this merely reflects the good news that fewer people with HIV/AIDS are dying from the disease. Which would he prefer?

Dr. Jaffe notes the disparate impact on minorities, that "AIDS cases rates are 10 times higher in African-Americans than in white Americans." But if he tossed away his AIDS tunnel vision he would acknowledge that more than eight times as many blacks die of cancer than of AIDS. In fact, more than four times as many blacks die of cancer annually than Americans of all races die of AIDS.

Although AIDS cases and deaths are declining and the disease remains completely preventable, it nonetheless gets almost $180,000 in research funds per death from the National Institutes of Health. Compare that to its closest rivals: Parkinson's disease, prostate cancer, and diabetes. All of these receive about $14,000 per death. Alzheimer's gets about $11,000. Yet Dr. Jaffe bemoans that the CDC HIV/AIDS budget has not kept up with inflation over the last few years. So a minimum 13-to-1 spending ratio over any other disease somehow isn't enough.

Further, it's possible we've already reached the point where HIV infection has become a controllable disease, especially for those with recent diagnoses. That's hardly the case with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

And that only includes medical research funding. Each year under the "Ryan White CARE" legislation, which Congress unanimously re-authorized in 2000, approximately $2 billion in taxpayer funds are doled out to AIDS patients for medicine, housing, meals, cash payments, dental care, and a vast panoply of goods and services. Victims of no other disease have any such entitlement.

And yet as Dr. Jaffe's complaint makes clear, for the activists and bureaucrats nothing we say or do or spend will ever be enough. To which we must finally respond: Enough!

Each year under the "Ryan White CARE" legislation, which Congress unanimously re-authorized in 2000, approximately $2 billion in taxpayer funds are doled out to AIDS patients for medicine, housing, meals, cash payments, dental care, and a vast panoply of goods and services. Victims of no other disease have any such entitlement.

Yep. Our fair, benevolent govenmnent at work spending our tax dollars where they are needed most.

I thought the biggest problem was the national epidemic of obesity.

OK, guys -- what it is: VD – like AIDS -- is largely a BEHAVIOR RELATED CONDITION!

Bill Clinton's CDC released figures a few years ago reflecting that fully
85% of all AIDS/HIV cases are:
1. Active, non-monogamous homosexuals (the largest subset);
2. Heterosexuals and bisexuals who have had sex with group 1; and
3. IV drug abusers who share needles.

(Kinda gives new meaning to Romans 6:23, doesn't it?)

The remaining 15% (the REAL “victims” of AIDS!!) are those who have contracted AIDS via other, non-sexual/non-drug means SUCH AS TRANSFUSIONS OF TAINTED BLOOD (which one homosexual "leader" on the West Coast URGED his fellow homosexuals to CONTINUE to attempt to contaminate in order to involve the straight community in the push to increase federal funding for AIDS research).

What a guy -- er -- GAY!

I'd guess the stats in Africa are equally appalling -- and worse. There was a report some time ago (which has apparently now been deemed too non-PC to remain in the US press) that some adult male HIV infectees are raping girls aged 2 after hearing that doing so would "cure" AIDS. That sort of behavior redefines "ignorance" and suggests that pouring MORE US tax money down that rathole will have little or no impact on the problem.

Strongly makes the case that AIDS is not only a medical disease, but a political disease as well.

And under the Kissoff Care bill, veterans who contracted chronic Hepatitis C from airgun shots, contaminated blood, or contact with the blood of the wounded, get...

Bloody f**k all. Not even medicine.

Maybe they should have become pickle-smooching rim rocketeers instead of serving their country.

Want to stop AIDs?
Don't have anal sex.
Don't have sex with someone who does.
Don't use IV drugs.

There was that so hard?

You may want to visit fumento.com and look at the fifty articles on obesity and the book "The Fat of the Land" by Michael Fumento. You can also search the index of more than fifty different subjects he has written about.
Fumento has done a terrific amount of research and writing. The stuff I've read is all good.

"The proportion of Americans who consider HIV/AIDS to be the most urgent health problem facing this nation today has decreased … to 17% in 2002

Boo-hoo. If HIV was a real virus, like the Doomsday Virus at the end of WW1 that killed 20M people, we wouldn’t need panic stories from the CDC to help us remember it. A real virus doesn’t need the help of the MSM. Let me explain.

When looking at what causes AIDs, or any disease, there are a number of "usual suspects". Pathogens (bacteria or viruses) are a likely cause. Toxin exposure is also a likely cause. Deficiency (not enough vitamins, not enough food) is a third.

To tell which one we are dealing with (pathogen or toxin/deficiency) we look at the epidemiology of the disease (epidemiology = how a disease spreads).

AIDs has stayed within the defined at-risk sectors of the population (e.g. drug users, homosexual men) and hasn't expanded exponentially into the general population. Despite Oprah's dire warnings (remember those?), heterosexual non-drug users (at any rate, those who eat properly and who have no significant toxin exposure) have not in fact been ravaged by AIDs. Prostitutes who don't do drugs and have no other catabolic stresses haven't been ravaged by AIDs.

But viruses just do not behave like this. They are little bits of nucleic clockwork. They are obligatory parasites - they infect, and they have to infect. They expand exponentially into populations and then die off as the population achieves resistance. The epidemiology of AIDs is non-infectious, and so AIDs must be non-viral.

The epidemiology of AIDs is instead similar to that of toxin exposure or nutrition-deprivation. A good analogy is with long-term smokers or heavy drinkers: people with heavy expossure to toxins for a long period tend to develop diseases: those who aren't exposed, don't. You don't catch lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver by touch, you get them from toxin exposure.

In the early cases of AIDs (GRID = Gay Related Immune Disease/Disorder) there was an obvious toxic cause: the inhaling of amyl nitrite to assist anal intercourse. Inhaling of amyl nitrite is a lethal habit, and a demarcated homosexual phenomenum. Therefore – this form of AIDs appeared amongst gay men only, and stayed in the gay population.

But the vast majority of AIDs deaths were not and are not caused by nitrite poppers. Hardly. Poppers merely began the AIDs furore. Nowadays the classic popper-induced disease (Kaposi's Sarcoma, a dangerous cancerous lesion in the lungs) is no even longer defined as an AIDs disease - as the gay community drastically cut back on popper consumption in the early AIDs era. (However nitrite consumption is growing back again. By 2009 I predict that Kaposi's Sarcoma will be back on the CDC's list of AIDs diseases. You read it here first)

The real killer in AIDs (the real toxic cause) was and is iatrogenic poisoning: by which I mean the treatment for HIV infection itself causes the disease. AZT - the old wonder drug for AIDS - is an extremely toxic chemotherapy drug: 1000 mg of AZT a day for months or years would kill anyone. 90% of all those thousands of AIDs deaths in the AZT days were caused by toxic liver failure, NOT by one of the CDC’s AIDs-defining diseases. Go figure.

These days doctors don't use AZT, or use less of it. They use cathepsin inhibitors. These aren't as poisonous as AZT, though they're still poisonous. Hence less patients are dropping dead, and so the HAART cocktail treatments have been hailed as miracle cures.

But my point would be - a cure for what? The only reason someone is given these sublethal AIDs “cures” is that they have reacted positively on a HIV test. They are assumed to be infected, even if they are symptomless, and therefore they come under a lot of pressure, both legal & moral, to comply with treatment. The treatment is poisonous (in the case of pure AZT extremely so) and so the patient tends to get worse. Result - you have an epidemic-by-diagnosis. You get diagnosed with the virus, and some time later you get sick.

But surely if the HIV test says you're infected, you're infected?

Well, no. The HIV tests (ELISA, Western Blot) have not been calibrated against the isolated virus itself. This is known as "gold standard calibration" - without such calibration, a serological test for viral antibodies has no business being used in medical practice. Without calibration you don’t know if your test is giving you a false-positive result or not.

There are over fifty conditions that have been documented to cause false positives in HIV tests. Some are probably statistically irrelevant (e.g. leprosy). But most are highly relevant. Tuberculosis, flu vaccination, recent tetanus vaccination, herpes, renal failure, pregnancy (second or later pregnancies particularly), rheumatoid arthritis, "sticky" blood (in Africans), "sickle cell" (in Africans), being African, organ transplants, malaria, hepatitis, haemophilia and antibodies to sperm have all known to create false-positives in HIV tests. Without calibration we don't know that anybody who's ever shown up positive on an HIV test actually had the virus - it could have been a false positive.

I repeat: without calibrating an HIV test against the virus itself it is impossible to use the test to indicate presence of the virus. The HIV tests react to proteins in the blood. To prove that they’re interacting with HIV proteins, you must have an isolate of HIV and be able to determine what the HIV proteins are.

So why not calibrate the tests already? Answer: you need an isolate of the virus to do this, and ... the HIV virus has not yet been isolated. There is a Nobel prize waiting for the first person who can isolate HIV. No-one has done it. After twenty years we are entitled to ask if the virus is actually there to be isolated.

Without an isolate of the HIV virus there's no proof that HIV actually exists. There’s no proof of sexual transmission, no proof of pathology. The epidemiology is non-viral.

There IS a correlation between positive HIV tests and actual illness, which is something you also get with other blood protein tests (such as the ESR test, the old pregnancy test). But that's it.

So, CDC, stop brow-beating us with fairy stories about a deadly virus that can’t be isolated. Prove HIV exists, or admit that your unscientific posturings have led to thousands of people being poisoned to death by their doctors.

My point exactly. Conservatives and moderates have allowed themselves to be guilted into silence when the bleeding left slathers hugely disproportionate amounts of money on these "self-inflicted injuries." Maybe we ought to award Purple Hearts instead of subsidized medical pampering to any AIDS patients over 21 whose voluntary sexual activities have resulted in contracting HIV --and save the taxpayer dollars for real health issues.

Quite so.

The entrenched culture of rape and domination of females widespread in Africa is compounded by superstitious denial that the disease even exists. One country, I think Uganda, successfully launched a re-education campaign based on abstinence until marriage and drove their rate of new infection down dramatically.

Other countries seem mired in ignorance, aided and abetted by western sexual liberationists who deny that any person, anywhere, should bear any responsibility whatsoever for his or her sexual actions.

It's the most pernicious devolutionary force on the planet -- a return to living like predatory animals. Coupled with the military dictatorships, frequent armed insurrections and ethnic cleansings all enforced by rape policies, these airhead sexual Marxists are condemning poor women to a life of total degradation.