Has The Status Quo Changed?
Dean
I recently found the following story via email from a woman named Kim Bannon (her home page is right here) who was diagnosed HIV+ in 1992 at the age of 29, and had multiple confirmatory tests for her HIV status, including repeated PCR tests. She's now in her 40s, in good health, and has never taken AIDS cocktail drugs.
The link she said I should read was a Wall Street Journal story on AIDS that won the Pulitzer prize for national reporting: Medicine: AIDS Fight Is Skewed By Federal Campaign Exaggerating Risks
There's a lot of interesting data in that story, but I have a question for those who might know more than me: has anything substantial changed since that story came out to question its statements about risk levels? I know we already spend a heck of a lot more on HIV research than we did back then. But has anything else of substance changed?
On the other hand, it was that campaign which tought me what condoms are.
Your AIDS essays make for some great, thought provoking reading - some of your best writing yet. I too learned about AIDS through Randy Schilts' book "And the Band Played On" - one of my all time favorite books.
Having recently argued in defense of evolution against intelligent design on your website, I note some similarities in your positions on both subjects (open to ID, questioning of HIV). However you are able to back up your skepticism of HIV with some pretty compelling data - unlike your support of ID.
It is becoming clear to me that while ID remains a scientifically baseless theory, the alternate hypothesis to HIV and AIDS is not. Looks like I'll have to do some research myself on the topic to learn more.
Thanks!
From talking to younger people in my area (northern Alabama - which may have been part of the problem), I think the education campaigns have gotten a lot better in terms of providing accurate information, but I don't know anything about targeting the correct groups.
However, what strikes me from the article is that it is clear that AIDS prevention funding was never aimed where it could do the most good, and for entirely political reasons. In 1987 there was no way this country was going to spend millions of dollars making sure gays and minorities knew how to prevent HIV infection, and since then the focus of the CDC's programs has been largely unchanged. What this has resulted in, I think, is the attitude "sure, anyone MIGHT get AIDS, but not me" in the less targeted communities.
The biggest change I see is that there are more different grassroots groups out there for AIDS issues. It's not just "gay" groups anymore, and these groups might make an impact given the $$ and opportunity.
Keep in mind that in the gay community there has always been resistance against anything that was perceived as impacting "the lifestyle". That was one of the key points of Schilts' book.
"Gay Cancer" was spreading like wildfire through the gay community, and it was clear early on that those who were most promiscuous were most at risk. Yet anyone who counseled safe sex or good old fashioned monogamy was called "anti-gay" and "fascist". Money and education weren't the answers.
I was an "embedded straight" in the gay community at the time and everyone knew that unprotected sex with strangers was the surest way to get sick, but people felt deep down that promiscuity was part of being gay and had a hard time balancing that belief with self-preservation.
Needless to say one of my friends was dead by the time he was 24.
There is a myth that the government didn't react fast enough to AIDS, or hasn't spent enough money on the disease. However "And The Band Played On" shatters the first myth, and the fact that the government spends roughly $250,000 trying to prevent each AIDS death yeat only $11,000 for each prostate cancer death (link to source) puts the lie to the second myth.
Money will only do so much to cure a disease - as the billions poured into AIDS and cancer research have shown. The gay community needs to do more to end the "culture of death" that breeds the disease in its own ranks.
My HIV skepticism is a hell of a lot more concrete and specific. I see a lot of sloppy science and a lot of reason to question the reigning orthodoxy there--and I see real-life researchers who are being treated like total flakes for raising nettlesome questions and proposing alternative theories, which disturbs me. I also see people with an HIV+ diagnosis being put on experimental drugs without full disclosure. All of that disturbs me a hell of a lot more than whether some school district in PA wants to make "questioning evolution" part of its curriculum.
It probably all has to do with my core belief that in a free society, the truth finds a way to bubble to the surface sooner or later.
Be sure to check out "Emperor of Scent" by Chandler Burr. Burr covers the saga of Luca Turin, a biologist who came up with an alternative theory on how we smell.
Current theory holds that we discern smell (and taste) based on the shape of a molecule. Turin has proven this theory wrong (two molecules with the exact same shape with different smells) and his theory right (two differently shaped molecules that smell the same because their vibrations are the same).
The book is an easy read, and shows how science is stifled by tenure and the peer review journals.
As for the topic, I can only say that I now have strong suspicions that in future generations the handling of AIDS, and to a lesser extent cancer, is going to be studied in university classrooms in all sorts of disciplines for how science, the media, and governments failed the public.
I will add HIV/AIDS to a thought I have about cancer: Chemoptherapy (and AZT) will, in the future, come to be viewed in the same light as we today view blood letting and treatment with leaches.
I don't think chemotherapy and AZT will ever be thought of as slimy and icky.
AZT is not distinct from cancer chemo, AZT IS cancer chemo.
It was designed in 1964 by Jerome Horwitz. (See, Horwitz et al, J.Org.Chem 29:2076 (1964.)
Think about that.
1981 -- first AIDS case
1987 -- first drug to treat AIDS, AZT.
Why did they pull old 23-year old cancer chemo off the shelf?
Answer: Because they panicked. They utterly failed to develop a vaccine (remember polio, remember small pox), so they had to do something. And the "something" was cancer chemo.
Problem: AZT was the only AIDS drug from 1987-1996.
Problem: AZT causes immunesuppresion.
Big problem: They prescribed life-time doses of AZT.
Consequence: Most AIDS patients have been killed by overprescription of AZT, than the dreaded virus.
Great discussion, here, folks.
Which is one of several reasons why it was banned as being far too dangerous even for terminal cancer patients.
Yet, oddly, in some parts of the world, we're still giving it to pregnant women and infants to word off HIV infection. Meanwhile, we have all these people who are HIV+ for 10, 15, 20+ years who are refusing any medication at all, and the AIDS establishment has barely been willing to examine these people (Duesberg was one of the very few, and is still one of the very few.)
From what I read, right now treating pregnant women with AZT is considered malpractice in the U.S., although it wasn't for well over a decade, and they were still forcing them onto AZT at late as the late 1990s.