Posted on 09/08/2008 5:49:29 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Adding Insult to Injury: Africa, AIDS, and Victim-Blaming
By Chuck Colson
9/5/2008
Approximately 30 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are thought to be infected with the HIV virus. Unlike the West, from the start, HIV/AIDS in Africa has ravaged the non-drug-using heterosexual population. Let me put it this way: People whose Western counterparts are not at risk for HIV/AIDS have been the epidemic’s principal victims in Africa. Why?
This has prompted many people to blame the victims in ways that played on the worst racial stereotypes and prejudices: Researchers and experts argued that “Africans were simply incapable of being anything but promiscuous where sex was concerned.”
They were wrong: The AIDS epidemic in Africa was not because of a unique African promiscuity. In some ways, it is the product of efforts to reduce the number of Africans.
In his book Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, Steven Mosher tells readers about the work of researchers David Gisselquist and Stephen Potterat. Prior to their work, it had been assumed that the AIDS epidemic had been spread by heterosexual sex.
Assumed because there was little evidence that this was the case. But, as Mosher points out, it was an assumption that suited the needs of various influential parties: most obviously, AIDS activists.
Another such group was population controllers who believed that Africa was “overpopulated.” A heterosexually spread epidemic would allow them to flood the continent with condoms. While Africans might not have used them for birth control, surely they would use them to prevent the spread of a potentially lethal virus!
Gisselquist and Potterat put the heterosexual transmission assumption to the test and found it wanting. Their peer-reviewed analysis of 22 studies found that instead of 90 percent of African AIDS cases being the result of sexual transmission, as was assumed, the real number was 25 to 35 percent. By way of comparison, the U.S. percentage is well over 50.
According to the researchers, the evidence suggested a “large majority of HIV infections in non-promiscuous adults.” Far from being the victims of their own promiscuity, half of all African AIDS victims were involved in monogamous relationships.
So, if promiscuity is not driving the epidemic in Africa, what is? Substandard medical care—specifically, dirty needles. Almost uniquely, in Africa the more “health care” a person receives, the greater her chances of being infected.
That is because the sanitary conditions we take for granted do not exist in poor African countries. There, syringes and surgical instruments are often re-used without proper sterilization. The needles used to administer vaccine can also transmit AIDS.
It is not only vaccination. The World Health Organization has acknowledged that needles used to administer contraceptives like Depo-Provera are often re-used. Their likely connection to the spread of HIV was tacitly confirmed by their replacement in 2002 by needles that could be used only once.
While it is impossible to know how many women were infected this way, it is clear that population-control efforts, inadvertently maybe, contributed to the spread of the virus in Africa.
But what was not inadvertent was the libeling of an entire continent by outsiders with agendas. People who did or should have known the truth went along with a lie, adding insult to a most grievous injury.
This is part two in a three-part series.
Yawnnnnnnnn....here’s the offer. Self inject to prove your wacakadoo thesis that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.
JUST DO IT
Re the “self injection challenge”: two doctors discovered the source of an ulcer to be bacteria, not stress. The meducrats erupted. One of the honest docs then put the bacteria in his own body, and developed an ulcer.
Exactly, GGG could win the Nobel prize in medicine by self injecting and proving HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. But he won’t stand behind his own thesis.
Now how did I know Drano would chicken out? Most people with low-watt bulbs weren’t born that way. They became that way through a series of choices. It’s a character thing.
JUST DO IT
Dr. Goldberger did the same thing by injecting himself with the bodily fluids of pellagra patients to prove it was not contagious. When he didn’t come down with pellagra, they still didn’t believe him. That’s why Duesberg et al want the NIH/CDC to agree to make their proposed human experimentation study a serious media event IMHO. In other words, they don’t want it to be for nothing. After all, the latency period from HIV to AIDS is now calculated at over 15 years. That’s a long time for people to forget. Heck, if they keep inceasing the latency period, Duesberg et al will die of old age before they get AIDS!!!
Reprehensible. Kinda reminds me of the DDT scam.
Bingo! As I was saying above, I have read reports that everything from broken arms to accident victims were being reported as AIDS cases in Africa. But it even gets worse than that. Check my profile page for more—GGG
Nope, I think Chuck Colson is a good guy. I agree with virtually every point made in his article, except for the assumption that HIV causes of AIDS. I see no evidence that I should blame him for not knowing about the other side. Indeed, there was a time when I championed the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Luckily, I had friends in the scientific community who made me aware of the other side in the early days of the epidemic.
The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition PETER DUESBERG†, CLAUS KOEHNLEIN* and DAVID RASNICK Donner Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA *Internistische Praxis, Koenigsweg 14, 24103 Kiel, Germany † Corresponding author (Fax, 510-643-6455; Email, duesberg@uclink4.berkeley.edu) In 1981 a new epidemic of about two-dozen heterogeneous diseases began to strike non-randomly growing numbers of male homosexuals and mostly male intravenous drug users in the US and Europe. Assuming immunodeficiency as the common denominator the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) termed the epidemic, AIDS, for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. From 1981–1984 leading researchers including those from the CDC proposed that recreational drug use was the cause of AIDS, because of exact correlations and of drug- specific diseases. However, in 1984 US government researchers proposed that a virus, now termed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is the cause of the non-random epidemics of the US and Europe but also of a new, sexually random epidemic in Africa. The virus-AIDS hypothesis was instantly accepted, but it is burdened with numerous paradoxes, none of which could be resolved by 2003: Why is there no HIV in most AIDS patients, only antibodies against it? Why would HIV take 10 years from infection to AIDS? Why is AIDS not self-limiting via antiviral immunity? Why is there no vaccine against AIDS? Why is AIDS in the US and Europe not random like other viral epidemics? Why did AIDS not rise and then decline exponentially owing to antiviral immunity like all other viral epidemics? Why is AIDS not contagious? Why would only HIV carriers get AIDS who use either recreational or anti-HIV drugs or are subject to malnutrition? Why is the mortality of HIV-antibody-positives treated with anti-HIV drugs 7–9%, but that of all (mostly untreated) HIV-positives globally is only 1⋅4%? Here we propose that AIDS is a collection of chemical epidemics, caused by recreational drugs, anti-HIV drugs, and malnutrition. According to this hypothesis AIDS is not contagious, not immuno- genic, not treatable by vaccines or antiviral drugs, and HIV is just a passenger virus. The hypothesis explains why AIDS epidemics strike non-randomly if caused by drugs and randomly if caused by malnutrition, why they manifest in drug- and malnutrition-specific diseases, and why they are not self-limiting via anti-viral immunity. The hypothesis predicts AIDS prevention by adequate nutrition and abstaining from drugs, and even cures by treating AIDS diseases with proven medications. [Duesberg P, Koehnlein C and Rasnick D 2003 The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemo- therapy and malnutrition; J. Biosci. 28 383–412]
How are we going to get conservatives to wake up to the fact that the left has perpetrated (and continues to perpetrate) the biggest scandal in medical history???
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