Blisstree
Decades ago, the causes of HIV and AIDS were a mystery–and one that, because the disease was thought to only kill gay men and drug users, many researchers, politicians, and members of the public didn’t feel like solving. Public perception and research have come a long way since then, but some individuals, like Christian extremist Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association (AFA), are still set on preaching a dangerous, hateful message: that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that it’s a scam, and that it’s not something that straight people need to worry about. Do not listen to these false prophets.

Speaking on his radio show, Focal Point, this week, Fischer claimed that HIV was created as a way to get money for research of AIDS, which gay people get, he says, from drug use. From the show:

The reason that HIV was invented as the cause of AIDS is it was a way to get research money…If AIDS is caused by behavior, then there’s no money in that because you just tell people, ‘Hey, stop doing the behavior.’ But..so that’s why they have to find some bug that they can blame it on. ‘We gotta kill this thing, we need billions of dollars of research…’ so we’re chasing after something…that even if we got it, it wouldn’t do a single, solitary thing.

The AFA may have an innocent-sounding name, but the group’s dispersal of extreme (and extremely unfounded) anti-gay information has led some policy centers to classify them as a hate group, citing that their potentially influential message (that AIDS something that only gay people get, that HIV is made up to drum up research dollars, that both HIV and AIDS aren’t transmitted sexually) could potentially lead to the deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.

Fischer was joined on the show by a known AIDS-denier (who holds a PhD), Dr. Peter Duesberg, who has been widely condemned in the medical community for distributing dissenting information about AIDS. At one point, Duesberg spent time in South Africa, a country torn apart by the disease–and by misinformation about who can get the disease and how. Its then-President was also an AIDS denier, and the two of them have been cited as possibly being responsible for the death of as many as 330,000 individuals, and the infection of thousands more, including infants. And yet, because he holds a doctorate, his damaging message continues to be listened to.

Duesberg’s conclusion in the interview? That “about half” of the people who have AIDS are intravenous drug users (which isn’t true), while the other half are promiscuous gay men (not, he clarifies, your “all-American homosexual next door”) who have “hundreds [or] thousands of partners” and who take “tons of drugs.” And while homosexual men are still one of the biggest risk groups for full-blown AIDS, the perception that all gay men living with AIDS are “promiscuous” is just ignorant and hurtful. Additionally, both of these men might be surprised to find themselves in the company of the highest-rising risk group: heterosexual baby boomers. In 2011, older straight people were the fastest-growing HIV-positive demographic.

That individuals in the United States who hear this message may believe it, and as a result, stop taking simple measures to protect themselves (in many cases, a condom is truly all it takes) is just the beginning of what is so concerning. There are also much more deep-seating notions of intolerance and hate. This line of thinking is a one-two punch of harmful pseudo-science and extreme bigotry. It is rooted in anti-gay sentiments that the LGBT and ally community have been battling against for decades, but is backed by roundly-criticized “medical” science–which makes it doubly dangerous. And it has widespread consequences–many in Africa are still clinging to the beliefs espoused by Duesberg, and, as a result, continue to spread the disease.

It’s time to stop conflating medicine with morals in this way, and end the politicizing of diseases like AIDS. Maliciously condemning the victims of a disease that impacts everyone and spreading hateful information that could potentially lead to the deaths of thousands gets us nowhere.

Newvision

ON June 5 1981, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) reported a cluster of cases of pneumocysitis pneumonia, a very rare condition, in five gay men in Los Angeles. This was the discovery of a new disease that would be called AIDS.

But the 30-year story of HIV/AIDS commemorated last month is severely truncated. The HIV story typically starts from the first diagnosis of AIDS but ignores where, when and how the virus originated. Theories propagated in 1980s by western scientists about the African origin of HIV/AIDS through eating monkeys and chimpanzees became increasingly ridiculous, untenable and laughable, and were quietly discarded. It was a scientific fraud.

By the end of 1981, 121 people in the US had died of AIDS and were from San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. It means they had been infected at least two years earlier that is in 1979. They had never been to Africa, or eaten monkeys or chimpanzees.

The very first Aids patient was called Gaetan Dugas from Manhattan, New York, referred to as Patient Zero. An epidemic moves from an epicentre to non-infected area and it takes time. It follows that from the origin in the US to Africa it two to five years.

The earliest recognised AIDS case in Uganda was diagnosed in 1982, in Kenya 1983, in Burundi 1984, Botswana 1986, and Ethiopia 1987. Between 1981 and 1983, there were 5,660 AIDS cases in the US compared to only 17 for the entire Africa, suggesting that US was the epicentre and origin of HIV and Aids.

HIV never existed before 1978, when HIV was manufactured in a laboratory in the US. The origin of HIV is associated with a programme in the States called the Special Virus Cancer Programme (SVCP) which started in 1964 for the “development, production, seeding and deployment of animal cancer and immune-suppressant viruses”.

A major activity of this programme was to create mutant viruses by breaking pieces from different viruses and recombining these to create new viruses.

The viruses were grown or cultured in human cells, thus making them specific to humans. By 1974 an HIV – like virus had been created and consisted of 24% Bovine Leukaemia Virus (BLV) and 33% Bovine Visna Virus (BVV).

In 1985 Science Magazine published an electronic picture of HIV and found that a good part of it was indistinguishable from BVV. Further genetic engineering experiments involved Herpes virus and retroviruses. In 1973, a Danish pathologist, J Clemmensen, warned at a conference that genetically altered viral agents could cause a global epidemic if they ever left the lab.

Through the SVCP, the entire science and technology of retroviruses and immune response testing were developed before the emergence of AIDS. T-cells, reverse transcriptase, retroviruses, and the Western Blot testing machine were all discovered/ invented in 1970s, before HIV and AIDS. The researchers at SVCP were for a whole decade “detecting, locating, isolating and culturing retroviruses” before the emergence of HIV and AIDS. A scientist commented “it is fortuitous that the lentiviruses family waited for 7 million years to become pathogenic to man in 1981 when he had conveniently had the tools to detect, locate and culture retroviruses”!

The spread of HIV across the world is linked to the experimental Hepatitis B vaccine which was tested on young volunteer homosexual men from 1978 to 1981 in the US. This vaccine was contaminated with HIV, probably by mistake.

Within three years, 64% of those who got the vaccine had HIV. It would have been useful to determine the genetic sequence of the blood samples of the original patients but the samples are now stored in a freezer sealed by US Department of Justice.

The first 14 AIDS patients were from Manhattan and Greenwich Village, New York. When their addresses were plotted, the New York City Blood Centre, which was administering the hepatitis B vaccine, was found to be the epicentre of the disease.

Contrary to the puzzlement of AIDS scientists about the origin of AIDS being in Haiti (African link), New Yorkers who routinely go for sex tourism in Port au Prince actually took AIDS to Haiti in 1979 after Hepatitis experimental vaccination had got under way. And so Haiti became the fourth epicentre of HIV and AIDS after New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Hepatitis vaccine was introduced in Kenya, Gambia, Uganda and Zambia in 1981. By 1982 these countries had begun to experience HIV/AIDS. From 1982 to 1983 the vaccine was introduced in Mozambique, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Swaziland. Aids epidemic started in these countries from 1983 -1985.

These countries became HIV/AIDS epicenters in Africa. This explains why the epicenters are thousands of kilometers apart.

In the early 1980s, Wilson Casselwell, a Scottish surgeon based at Mulago Hospital, carried out a study in which he tested 716 sexually active and healthy young adults and compared the results with those of elderly and not sexually active persons. 15% of the young adults were HIV positive and none of the elderly people was HIV positive. He concluded that HIV was not an old disease in Uganda but had only recently reached the country.

The untold story of the origin of HIV has lessons for us all. As a country we need to seek crucial information about the origin of diseases ourselves if common information is deceptive. We should not depend on international experts.

Vital information on disease can be suppressed in the interest of one country to the detriment of other countries. Racial bias and profiling have defined the way in which the origin of HIV has been explained. It has been treated as a disease of Africans. We should reject such racial profiling and stick to objectively describing diseases.

Disease-causing agents can be manufactured and HIV is an example. It may be accidental, through neglect, deliberate (for example as a biological weapon) or malicious by rogue scientists. We need to develop capacity to gather intelligence on such agents.

The need to check all drugs and vaccines for quality cannot be over emphasised. The danger of importing fake, contaminated and substandard pharmaceutical products is real and increasing.

The writer is an MP and International Health consultant