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By Charles L. Geshekter
Reappraising AIDS Sept./Oct. 1997
https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/cgreappraising.htm

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The problem with the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable and often dull .
-- H.L. Mencken

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With all of this in mind, why do so many health professionals consider it useful or necessary to view the diseases of poverty in Africa as sexually contagious? And why did they ever believe it?

Defining AIDS in Africa

CDC physicians Joseph McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch convened the WHO conference in the Central African Republic in 1985 that produced the "Bangui Definition" of AIDS in Africa. The CDC had just adopted the HIV-AIDS model to explain the diseases of American drug injectors, a cohort of promiscuous urban gays in the party drug scene, and transfusion recipients. HIV turned out to be one of the many viruses that tended to react with blood from these patients. The same was true of blood from Africans afflicted with the diseases of poverty. The HIV-AIDS model assumed that AIDS would "spread" via HIV to a much larger fraction of Africans than those who currently suffered from it.

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These findings prompted The Lancet to acknowledge editorially that "current strategies to improve the world's health may need to be reassessed" and to ponder "how much more money is spent on research into HIV infection [the 30th cause of death] than into the causes of suicide [#12] or the prevention of road-traffic accidents [#9] and why should this be."(11)

Racism and African Sexuality

Whereas AIDS in the industrialized countries almost exclusively confines itself to a tiny percentage of homosexuals, drug injectors, and transfusion patients, AIDS afflicts the same general African population that faces such ancient scourges as malaria, schistosomiasis, and sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis).

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Does the "AIDS epidemic" in Africa portend the future of the developed world? The scientific establishment certainly thinks so. Biomedical funds that had been earmarked to fight African malaria, tuberculosis, and leprosy are now diverted into sex counseling and condom distribution, while social scientists have shifted their attention to behavior modification programs and AIDS awareness surveys.

Good Intentions, Bad Science: HIV Tests and Disease

A reappraisal of AIDS in Africa must recognize that HIV tests are notoriously unreliable among African populations where antibodies against endemic conventional viruses and microbes cross-react to produce ludicrously high false-positive results. For instance, a 1994 study on central Africa reported that the microbes responsible for tuberculosis and leprosy were so prevalent that over 70% of the HIV-positive test results there are false.(22)

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For the period 1984-95, the WHO compared estimates of HIV seropositivity with the actual numbers of AIDS cases in its Weekly Epidemiological Reports. The cumulative result is that 99.95% of all Africans do not have AIDS -- including 97% of those who test HIV-positive. These facts strikingly contradict the popular view of an Africa overrun by fatal HIV infections.(29)

AIDS and the Medicalization of Poverty

Primary health care systems in Africa will remain hampered until public health planners systematically gather statistics on morbidity and mortality to accurately show what causes sickness and death in specific African countries. During the past ten years, as the external financing of HIV-based AIDS programs in Africa dramatically increased, money for studying other health problems remained static, even though deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, neo-natal tetanus, respiratory diseases, and diarrhea grew at alarming rates.(30)

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"People think a positive test means no hope, so the children are relegated to the back wards of hospitals which have no resources and they die. They are very sick when they come to us. Usually they are depressed, withdrawn, and silent... But as a result of their care here, they put on weight, recover from their infections, and thrive. Hygiene is excellent [and] nutrition is very good; they get vitamin supplements, cod liver oil, greens every day, plenty of protein. They are really flourishing."(36)

Conclusion

People can be encouraged to behave thoughtfully in their sexual lives if they are provided with reliable information about condom use, contraception, family planning, and venereal diseases. Multilateral institutions and African AIDS educators should familiarize themselves with the scientific literature that demonstrates the contradictions, anomalies, and inconsistencies in the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy.(37)

They have a major responsibility to consider the non-contagious explanations for "AIDS" cases in Africa and to stop the proliferation of terrifying misinformation that equates sexuality with death. *

References

(1) Gilks CF "What use is a clinical case definition for AIDS in Africa?"BMJ303:1189-90, (Nov. 9, 1991).

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