The New Tuskegee Experiments
Dean
Dr. Rand Fishbein, a former staff member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and former special assistant to Senator Daniel Inouye notes that, when it comes ti AIDS in Africa, the Tuskegee experiments appear to have been revived.
Most people are shocked to learn this, but to get an AIDS diagnosis in Africa, you do not even get any of the standard HIV-antibody tests. Rather, they rely on a short list of symptoms:
Fever, diarrhea, weight loss, and coughing or itching.
Ever look at the symptom list for malaria, dysentery, cholera, or malnutrition? I suggest you not bother. I also suggest you not ask yourself why we give more money for patients with AIDS diagnoses in Africa than we do for people diagnosed with malaria, dysentery, cholera, or malnutration. Really, there's nothing to see there, citizen. Move along.
I also suggest you not ask yourself why this special strain of AIDS in Africa rarely infects the indigenous white population. Or why the African version almost never manages to make its way over to Europe or America--even though the special U.S. & European AIDS were supposed to have come from Africa in the first place (supposedly because someone had sex with a monkey)?
Do not question these things, citizens. It is necessary that we fight this super dastardly version of AIDS that doesn't even require an AIDS test for a diagnosis--just fever, rash, weight loss, and diarrhea--by giving black people drugs which are carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic, and which also cause miscarriage and stillbirth. Drugs which also cause nausea, vomiting, and rapid weight loss. Because this plague that's so bad it doesn't even require tests(!!) will kill hundreds of millions if we don't pump them full of drugs.
Nothing wrong here. Move along, citizen. Anyone who questions any of this is sociopathic or a flat-earther.
(May I suggest once again that you read Fishbein's piece?)
Meanwhile, by interesting coincidence, the very left-wing journalist Liam Scheff has published a new HIV report--and it's been put out by the (generally seen as) right-wing group Accuracy In Media. In it, Scheff notes:
As a journalist who writes about AIDS, I am endlessly amazed by the difference between the public and the private face of HIV; between what the public is told and what's explained in the medical literature. The public face of HIV is well-known: HIV is a sexually-transmitted virus that particularly preys on gay men, African-Americans, drug users, and just about all of Africa, although we're all at risk. We're encouraged to be tested, because, as the MTV ads say, "knowing is beautiful." We also know that AIDS drugs are all that's stopping the entire African continent from falling into the sea.
The medical literature spells it out quite differently. The journals that review HIV tests, drugs and patients, as well as the instructional material from medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and HIV-test manufacturers, will agree with the public perception in the large print. But when you get past the titles, they'll tell you, unabashedly, that HIV tests are not standardized; that they're arbitrarily interpreted; that HIV is not required for AIDS; and finally, that the term HIV does not describe a single entity, but instead describes a collection of non-specific, cross-reactive cellular material.
That's quite a difference.
Ya think?
Scheff also notes several things about the latest push for everyone in America to take the HIV tests. May I suggest you read Scheff's entire piece?
But no. Perhaps you shouldn't. Really, nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.
(Thanks to Bill H. for the Fishbein link, and Chuck Ortleb for the AIM link).
All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:
- The New Tuskegee Experiments
- From The Mailbag: Explaining the BS Theory
- Conflicts of Interest...
- A Conversation
- HIV Skepticism
- Scientific Dissenters
Came across this tidbit this morning.
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/may03/pilcher052903.html
BTW - can anyone tell me how to get the link function on this site to work???
How does this diagnosis affect the statistics we always see about African AIDS? How much are they overblown?
This is the one that gets "HIV==AIDS" blown away by Koch's Postulates, if I understand them correctly. It is the smoking gun that turned me into an HIV doubter. Hell, it's postulate number one.
You tell me.
However, I do believe most of the numbers are cooked, hyped and exaggerated.
There are 2 good, readable, pieces on AIDS in Africa: One on the right by Tom Bethell of The American Spectator and one on the left by Rian Malan in Rolling Stone.
I don't know how much press Bethel's generated, but Malan's generated a lot of criticsm, which, of course, should be examined as well, since here at Dean's, we review ALL the evidence, pro and con, on any issue.
Hank Barnes
I can't tell you. That's why I'm asking.
Some few people in Africa wealthy enough to pay for testing kits--very few, almost certainly well under 1%--use things like the Western Blot test. Amazingly, those people don't much get diagnosed with AIDS, with only a few exceptions. The black population, however, gets diagnosed with AIDS based on fever, diarrhea, weight loss, and coughing or itching.
They'll tell you that by making note of this fact, I'm part of an insideous right-wing (or left-wing) agenda to deny suffering and death. Or just a crank who has it in for doctors. Or something like that.
Hmm. I'd rather go for that than for AIDS drug cocktails.
(Rumor has it a somewhat improved food supply might help too, though.)
I know for me, I'd rather see money going to the things suggested above. Clean water, food etc. The tricky thing there is that so much of the malnutrition and so on in Africa is politically induced, rather than the result of genuine famine. That makes solving the problem more difficult than just sending over crates of food.
You're absolutely right Dean; there's nothing to see in Scheff's piece. Nothing but half truths and deliberate distortions. Anyone who bothers to read the sources he cites will see that for themselves.
Dale
I HATE getting preached to either way ;)
What is it you do for a living, anyway?
Maor: Opposing scientific experiments in which patients are not fully informed, and in which results are deliberately hidden by those in charge, is preaching?
Um, yeah. Not that there's anything whatsoever wrong with that.
I was referring to the situation where giving Africans potentially harmful drugs is condemned and NOT giving Africans potentially helpful drugs is condemned (not by the same people, of course).
I'm not saying this particular study was done properly. I just think you would oppose giving Africans anti-HIV drugs even if it was done by the book (although the outrage would be lower).
http://www.who.int/hiv/strategic/en/bangui1985report.pdf
By "it" I'm assuming you mean Scheff's piece. I read Scheff's piece too. I also read or tried to, the sources from which Scheff is drawing his 'citations'; which admittedly aren't that easy to find based on the way he cites them.
But just to look at a few examples.
1. Diagnosing AIDS in Africa. In 1985 it may have been done without HIV tests because suitable HIV tests weren't available. ELISAs and Western blots require equipment that is sophisticated by the standards of many Third World laboratories. The tests have been simplified and in 2005, at least in many parts of Africa, an AIDS diagnosis includes testing for HIV.
2. Infection rates in Zimbabwe. Scheff implies that HIV rates dropped dramatically from one year to the next because many Zimbabwe women may have been the victims of false positive HIV tests which is NOT what the original citation says at all. The rates of HIV infection did not drop from one year to the next; the estimates of the rates dropped. They dropped because the infection frequency among pregnant women tested at prenatal clinics one year were higher than the frequency of infection found in younger women (15 -19) who were sampled at random the following year. In the second study, seropositivity among slightly older women (over 19) was almost 40%, very similar to the previous study. Scheff didn't bother to mention that.
3. Toxicity of antiHIV drugs. Scheff points out that AZT and nevirapine may be toxic but fails to mention ANY of the studies (including non-NIH ones) that clearly demonstrate that they are at least partially effective in reducing mother to child transmission of the virus. Nor does he mention the studies that show that HIV positive babies are anywhere between 5 and 10 times more likely to die as infants than are HIV negative babies, so preventing viral transmission is something these women are likely quite anxious to do.
4. Scheff also makes a big deal about how many different conditions have been reported in the past (mostly 80s and early 90s) to give rise to false positives on HIV tests. The newer tests that are being used since the late 90s are much better and even using the older tests, he fails to mention that the vast majority of the conditions that give rise to false positives are temporary conditions; retesting the individual in question will usually result in a negative. Check it out and you will find that screening tests for syphilis have much greater false positive rates than HIV tests do.
5. Scheff writes: The June 20, 2004 Boston Globe reported that "the current estimate of 40 million people living with the AIDS virus worldwide is inflated by 25 percent to 50 percent." ...
But numbers about "AIDS deaths, AIDS orphans, numbers of people needing antiretroviral treatment, and the average life expectancy" are all taken from that one test.
So assume that the estimate of people living with HIV is inflated by 50%; that's still 26 million people living with HIV. AIDS deaths, AIDS orphans and average life expectancy are NOT taken from that one test. Deaths are deaths. Look at the latest figures from South Africa. In a period when the population has grown by about 10%, deaths have increased by more than 50%. And deaths among 15 -49 year olds have almost doubled. Although the causes of death listed on death certificates may be the same as they always were, that pattern is very different from what was happening before the 1980s. There is a definite and increasing spike in deaths amongst young adults. If these increases were due to increased malnutrition or contaminated drinking water, you would expect the increases in mortality to be greatest in the very young or the very old, the groups who have always been the least resistant to these conditions. But they aren't and Scheff ignores that little titbit as well.
That's what I mean by deliberate distortions.
Dale
4. Scheff also makes a big deal about how many different conditions have been reported in the past (mostly 80s and early 90s) to give rise to false positives on HIV tests. The newer tests that are being used since the late 90s are much better and even using the older tests, he fails to mention that the vast majority of the conditions that give rise to false positives are temporary conditions; retesting the individual in question will usually result in a negative.
Just wanted to chime in on this element, because this was one of the aspects of the discussion that I really looked into. Have a look at Operational Characteristics of Commercially Available Assays to Detect Antibodies to HIV-1 and/or HIV-2 in Human Sera Report 11, from the World Health Organization's website, dated January 1999.
It contains the following:
That quote appears on page 3 of the report (page 7 of the pdf) To be fair, the report does go on to discuss Line immuno-assay (LIAs) and other tests which are more accurate, but are also considerably more expensive. I post this not because of the way HIV is tested for in the developed world, but because of the way it is being tested (or not tested) in Africa.
It seems to me that, in Africa, even if many "AIDS patients" are being tested for HIV, how likely is it that they are receiving the multiple expensive tests recommended in that WHO report?
Also, regarding mortality statistics, I'm not an expert in this so I don't want to pretend otherwise, but just to add another element to the conversation, I point out this recent article from Nature:
Malaria Map Paints Stark Picture That article contains the following:
This is obvious. It has to do with basic mathematics, and has nothing to do with technology. If the HIV rate is lower than the false positive rate (no matter how low the false positive rate is), most positive results will be from healthy people.
("Fortunately" Africa does not have a "very low prevalence of HIV infection")
But how is testing being done in Africa? I don't have the answer to that, except that there are many reports pointing out that a lot more testing is needed, suggesting that the existing level of testing is inadequate in many places. As a result, some of what we think we know about the prevalence of infection there may be inaccurate.
That is my only point on that matter.
Fever, diarrhea, weight loss, and coughing or itching.
The HIV-antibody tests that are done--when they are done--are used with the assumption that if the patient presents with any of the above-named symptoms, they have AIDS.
Mind you, if you look at any of the stats on HIV, they'll tell you that the odds of transmission of HIV in a single sexual contact is on the order of 1 in 200. The presumption is that these darkies are fucking like jackrabbits--and by the way, they explain away the fact that HIV appears to be spreading through the black population in Africa because the black Africans typically practice what they call "dry sex," i.e. sex in which the female is neither willing nor able to lubricate---i.e. rape.
This "dry sex" apparentely explaining hundreds of millions of AIDS cases.
By the way, this was the hundreds of millions of AIDS cases that they were telling us would destroy most of sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1990s.
Nothing to see here citizen. Move alone.
My most knowledgable sources (living in SA) tell me that 1985 Bangui is what you get. WHO has never changed or updated this criteria, it still stands. Anyone presenting with a score greater than 12 get the AIDS label with or without an HIV test.
HIV testing is still mostly being done in ante-natal clinics and targeted to "high-risk" groups in urban areas, yet these results are being used to extrapolate dire predictions for the entire "doomed" continent. Read the info at UNAIDS site.
http://www.popline.org/docs/120168
This case definition is: an illness characterized by at least 2 major signs and 1 minor sign provided serologic tests for HIV are positive (major signs: weight loss >10% of body weight, chronic diarrhea for >1 month, and fever for >1 month; minor signs: cough >1 month, general pruritic dermatitis, recurrent Herpes zoster, oropharyngeal candidates, chronic progressive and disseminated Herpes simplex infection, and generalized lymphadenopathy).
So assuming this is representative, the list you gave, "fever, diarrhea, weight loss, and coughing or itching" isn't profoundy wrong, but I'd say it's misleading. It's not fever, it's fever for over a month, ditto diarrhea. It's not weight loss, it's weight loss of over 10% of original body weight. Yes, 'itching' does show up on there in the form of pruitic dermatitis, but usually it's not called dermatitis unless the skin is inflamed or oozing.
The way you're putting it is making it sound as though someone could show up at a doctor's office in Africa with a three-day stomach bug and a bit of eczema and be diagnosed as HIV positive, and according to the criteria above that's not an accurate characterization.
To address your point about malaria, dysentery, cholera, or malnutrition: The diarrhea arising from cholera is not 'chronic', it's about as acute as it can get, and with effective treatment can stop in a couple of days. Dysentery also does not involve chronic diarrhea, it's quite acute and tends to either subside spontaneously or kill the victim. In malaria infections, the typical course includes chronic fevers, but not the other 'major' symptoms of AIDS listed above. Malnutrition definitely causes fatigue and weight loss, but again, not usually chronic diarrhea lasting for more than a month or a fever.
I'm not saying that using a 'circumstantial evidence' case definition results in *no* misdiagnoses, because I'm sure it does, but it's not as likely as you're making it sound by posting that much more general version of the AIDS case definition.
dale
Dale: You didn't answer my question about what you do for a living.
East Afr Med J. 2004 May;81(5):226-9.
Actual cases being those who are cases by HIV testing.
dale