By Peter Duesberg
June 2000
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New and Contagious - or - Old Under a New Name?By Peter Duesberg
June 2000
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An infectious epidemic is typically diagnosed by scientists and non-scientists by a sudden increase in morbidity and mortality of a population. As a result the affected population declines significantly, and a relatively immune population emerges. The most readable modern description of such an epidemic is Albert Camus' "The Plague".
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The seasonal poliomyelitis epidemics from the days prior to the polio vaccine, and the ever new, seasonal flu epidemics are specific modern examples of viral epidemics.
All of these viral and microbial epidemics have the following in common:
(i) They rise exponentially and then decline within weeks or months as originally described by William Farr in the early 19th century (Bregman & Langmuir, 1990). The rise reflects the exponential spread of contagion and the fall reflects the resulting natural vaccination or immunity of survivors.
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Similarly the rather unspecific American epidemic of lung cancer-emphysema-heart disease-etc. rose steadily, not exponentially, in the 1950s and has lasted now for over 50 years without evidence for immunity. It did not spread randomly in the population but was restricted to smokers. And it is now slowly coming down as smoking slowly declines (Greenlee et al.,2000).
Likewise the American and European AIDS epidemics:
(i) rose steadily, not exponentially,
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The above summary indicates that American and European AIDS epidemics exhibit the characteristics of diseases caused by non-contagious, chemical or physical factors NOT viruses.
African AIDS in numbers
Now I will briefly analyze how African AIDS measures up with "the historical and epidemiological literature" described by Anderson and others (Fenneret al.,1974).
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To answer these questions we must try to distinguish African AIDS diseases from conventional African diseases (i) clinically as well as (ii) statistically.
The long list of African AIDS diseases can not be clinically distinguished from their conventional counterparts
According to the WHO's Bangui definition of AIDS (Widy-Wirski et al., 1988; Fiala, 1998) and the "Anonymous AIDS Notification" forms of the South African Department of Health, African AIDS is not a specific clinical disease, but a battery of previously known and thus totally unspecific diseases, for example:
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Since these diseases include the most common diseases in Africa and in much of the rest of the world, it is impossible to distinguish clinically African AIDS diseases from previously known, and concurrently diagnosed, conventional African diseases. Thus African AIDS is clinically unspecific, unlike microbial diseases, but just like some nutritionally and chemically caused diseases (see above).
African AIDS is too small to be detected statistically against the background of normal African morbidity, mortality and growth rates
We have already pointed out that it is almost impossible to be certain about the existence of a new African AIDS epidemic that claims only 0.6% of African mortality, particularly since all AIDS defining diseases are profoundly conventional African diseases.
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Because of the numerical discrepancy between the relatively high African growth rates (2.4 to 2.8%) and the small annual deficits of these growth rates to be expected from AIDS mortality (0.6%), an African AIDS epidemic can not be identified or confirmed based on its effect on the high African growth rates. In view of this, and the complete overlap between the complex battery of diseases that define the AIDS epidemic and their conventional counterparts, it appears that the presumably new AIDS epidemic can be neither distinguished epidemiologically nor clinically from conventional African diseases and mortality.
Deceptive reporting obscures analysis of African AIDS
To all of us who have been subjected to the American AIDS rhetoric, and indeed the rhetoric of our first meeting in Pretoria last May, about the "catastrophic dimensions" of African AIDS (Washington Post, April 30, 2000), the healthy African growth rates come as a big surprise. Take as an example of this rhetoric President Clinton's recent designation of AIDS as a "threat to US national security ... spurred by US intelligence reports that looked at the pandemic's broadest consequences, ... particularly Africa ... [and] projected that a quarter of southern Africa's population is likely to die of AIDS ..." (Washington Post, April 30, 2000).
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It would follow that the estimated increases in African HIV antibody (!)-positives do not correlate with decreases in any African population. On the contrary, they correlate with unprecedented simultaneous increases in the country's populations - hardly the "catastrophe" imagined by the Washington Post and propagated by the WHO and the American AIDS establishment. But this deceptive AIDS propaganda biases a scientific analysis of African AIDS by all those who are not aware of the facts.
Conclusions:
(1) The African AIDS epidemic fails all criteria of a microbial or viral epidemic:
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Acknowledgment: I thank Charles Geshekter, professor of history, Cal State University Chico, Chico, California for advice and critical statistics (see the Geshekter posts on this panel).
References:
Anderson, R. M., (1996): The spread of HIV and sexual mixing patterns. In: AIDS in the World II, pp. 71, J. E. Mann & D. J. M. Tarantola (eds.). Oxford Univ. press. Oxford.
Bregman, D. J. & A. D. Langmuir, (1990): Farr's law applied to AIDS projections. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 263: 50-57.
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