HIV/AIDS
Bookworm on Jun 05 2006 at 11:22 am | Filed under: Health
NPR is all over AIDS lately, because it is the 25th Anniversary of that terrible disease. NPRcelebrated today with a story blaming the West on the spread of AIDS. The theory is that the French in West Africa, in a well-intentioned move, innoculated too many people with too few needles. It's a perfectly plausible scenario, given that people in those days knew nothing of the disease and could perfectly well have done so. However, we know that AIDS spreads through methods other than needles, so it's entirely possible to think of other ways for the disease to have spread. As it is, the story has a novelistic quality that makes it interesting, but not necessarily completely compelling. As we know, diseases have always found vectors. Bird flu is only the most recent example.
The whole AIDS anniversary thing reminds me of where I was 25 years ago. I was working as a secretary one summer for two virologists in an urban hospital. They were busy writing a paper about a bizarre spectrum of rare diseases appearing amongst New York's gay population. My contribution was photocopying articles and typing — lots of typing. The article got published about three months before someone figured out that the diseases all resulted from an immune system failure that could be traced to a single virus.
My name actually shows up in the article along with many others ("with thanks to Ms. Bookworm"). The thanks were merited because, without me, they wouldn't have gotten the article published. (Of course, had they waited a bit longer, the article would have been written with AIDS in mind, and not just been written as a "hmmmm, why is this happening?" type of article.) You see, these researchers had a secretary before I came on board that summer. She was terrible — completely unproductive. Unfortunately, because of union rules, they couldn't fire here. What finally got her out of there was her maternity leave. I needed a summer job at the same time, and that's how I came to work for them. In that single summer, I helped them get published five separate articles that had been languishing, sometimes for years.
In any event, when AIDS suddenly appeared in the national consciousness, I was one of the few lay people who already knew about Kaposi's sarcoma, pneumocystis pneumonia, bizarre manifestations of tuberculosis, and all the other awful diseases AIDS brings in its wake. And because I lived in the Bay Area, I carry a long mental list of the dead.
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4 Responses to “HIV/AIDS”
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I have to blame Africa’s culture, backwards and voodoo superstitous, over the spread of AIDs. I don’t know how it got there, but I do know that African fetishes with underage girls is a majority of the problem. They actually believe if they have sex with a virgin, that they won’t get AIDs. Obviously, that is the best way to transmit AIDs. This is not even including those who believe they can get cured of AIDs if they have sex with a virgin. Africa being Africa, the only virgins are 8, 10, and 12 year olds.
the problem with the Congo Sex UN Scandal is that they actually use peacekeepers from other parts of Africa, cause those nations need the money that the UN spends on the African mercenaries.
Africa’s more of a mess than Iraq, and still it is the fault of the West, just like they believe Iraq is all the fault of America. Catch 22, as they say. Dead if you do, dead if you don’t. If you don’t find an out of the box solution, nobody is coming out of this alive.
There are so many disease vectors, it’s impossible to blame any one. Growing, mobile populations are certainly a factor, as are sexual practices. The repeated use of non-disposable needles was a huge problem (and continues to be one in poor countries). Also, sometimes, the time is just right for a new disease to take root. The ickiest example, of course, is the Black Plague. The most recent, before AIDS, the Spanish Influenza. Sometimes there’s just a perfect confluence of things, and Mother Nature runs amok.
It’s real important to be sure that the stories we choose to believe are congruent with the actual data - whether these stories are from the popular media, or the U.N., or Big Science.
There is a single country in sub-Saharan Africa whose statistics on births, deaths, and other demographic data are even remotely complete and reliable. That is South Africa, and total deaths among S. Africa’s citizens have increased pretty much in proportion to the population increase.
The actual statistics collected in that country are wildly at odds with the death toll derived from the computer models that UNAIDS runs in Switzerland - if the people of S. Africa were dying of AIDS as predicted, the death rate for anything else would have dropped precipitously! This has been documented by S. African journalist Rian Malan, (http://aliveandwell.org/html/africa/related_apoc_when.html), among others, but no one seems to want to hear good news if it contradicts the scary extrapolations about AIDS.
For the other side of AIDS, have a look at aliveandwell.org - where what seem like shocking statements and statistics are all referenced to the refereed journals of science. Remember the aliveandwell motto: Relax, It’s Just Information.
Finally, if you or someone you love should ever come up HIV positive (note that pregnancy is a documented cause of false positives), you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to be fully informed before deciding whether or not to follow standard medical advice and take the toxic HIV/AIDS drugs.
[...] From her outpost in the Bookworm Room, a blogger writes: The whole AIDS anniversary thing reminds me of where I was 25 years ago. I was working as a secretary one summer for two virologists in an urban hospital. They were busy writing a paper about a bizarre spectrum of rare diseases appearing amongst New York's gay population. My contribution was photocopying articles and typing — lots of typing. The article got published about three months before someone figured out that the diseases all resulted from an immune system failure that could be traced to a single virus. [...]