Original Publication
HEAL
Why AIDS? Why now?
When AIDS first appeared in America and in Africa, it sure seemed like a new disease. People who looked healthy suddenly got very sick and died very fast.
Well, now we know AIDS is not a disease (a Syndrome is a collection of symptoms) and it's not new (the symptoms are each known, if sometimes rare, conditions with known treatments).
But, still, why did the immune systems of (1) overachieving gay men, (2) over-the-top-drug users, and (3) never-before-so-underfed Africans suddenly collapse so... well... suddenly?
The description of the victims gives clues. Let's look closer.
We've all heard of the sexual revolution (and tried to enlist). But there were actually two of them. The first came just after World War II. The government funded war research on effective treatment of sexually transmitted disease because they feared another mother-wife revolt like that caused in WW I when soldiers came home all syphilitic.
After the war, the drug companies announced the end of sex-as-death. This was great for men... until they found that women wouldn't go along. Women feared pregnancy.
There was a group of men who didn't have this problem. Gay men could have as much sex as all men want to.
Ten years later, the birth control pill started the second sexual revolution. Women could have sex with no unwanted side effects. But men still had a problem: women just weren't so horny.
YOU CAN NOT BLAME SEX
There's a theory that some gay men had so much sex that they wore out their immune systems. But men having sex with men isn't new. And gay men seem to be having fewer sexual partners. By branding male-to-male sex as "gay," a whole population of men who would now be called "bi" were frightened out of the picture. Giving a name to what came naturally for some made it a term of mockery for those who were too scared or unattractive to go for it. The pool of part time men-with-men sex participants was depleted. Half of the gay men were driven to the gym to bulk up to play the missing role.
Sex wasn't new. And drug use wasn't new. What was new was the type of drugs that appeared.
Let's take non-medical drugs first. In the United States, the Mafia had long controlled powered drug distribution. As medical and "patent" medicines such as heroin and cocaine were gradually made illegal, the new distributors were able to increase the dosage and availability of convenient-to-dispense powered drugs. Where heroin and cocaine in low dose patent medicines had been sold across the counter to women who would never dream of drinking alcohol, now women were taught to drink and powered drugs became a rite of passage for young men beyond alcohol.
However, as the smarter Mafia figures died out, to be replaced by what Jimmy Breslin called "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight," Columbians and other outsiders took over the business. They took a global view and regulated prices and size of dose to effectively move their customers from gentle cocaine to crack cocaine to powered heroin to injected heroin.
Meanwhile, gay men had discovered a very enjoyable form of nitrate which could be inhaled. This put them on the track for other pleasurable drugs. (It was later discovered that one of the two original AIDS defining diseases, KS, can often be the result of inhaling nitrates.)
Then overachieving gay men met the new white powders.
But even the never-seen-before power of expertly merchandised new recreational drugs was not enough to cause AIDS.
It was new medical drugs that tipped the assault on man's body. Antibiotics were the first class of drug since aspirin that actually worked. Doctors were delighted. This business of bedside manner being the only thing that doctors had going for them was no longer so true.
The problem, of course, is that antibiotics work by killing. They kill bad stuff, they kill good stuff.
The body can only take so much.
The gay men enjoying the sexual revolution went to doctors for STD treatments. The doctors came up with a new theory: if antibiotics can kill STDs, perhaps they can prevent them. The body would be filled with antibiotics at all times so if any STDs came along, Pow! we got them.
Now we know that overuse of antibiotics has created millions of people whose immune systems are near collapse. The idea of regular use of a drug as a preventative seems to be a sure route to immune disfunction.
Several unique historical events created the Perfect Storm that hit a special group of open minded gay men and drug users. (Well, maybe you would call them obsessed.)
A one-time, unique combination of unusual factors came together to create something new and rarely seen. The Perfect Storm raged and left. What is the result today?
Not all people who develop AIDS are horny drug fiends. But we are all assaulted with antibiotics in medicine and food.
Speaking of food, overachieving men and overworked women (sorry about the cliches, society made me do it) make eating badly a matter of pride,
At HEAL meetings, we meet non-drug using, sexually moderate persons who can not accept the above thesis. But they are their first HEAL meeting because they tested HIV+, not because they are within weeks of death. They probably will not develop AIDS. They will get sick as everyone on the planet does. The only difference is that they will believe that HIV made them sick while others will blame the weather, bad spirits, germs, bad diet...
Speaking of diet, the original AIDS patients had notoriously bad diets. Seems they thought having sex was more fun than shopping for yogurt, getting stoned more fun than chopping vegetables.
BACK TO AFRICA
This whole diet discussion brings to us to Africa.
Roberto Giraldo, a board member of HEAL, attended a conference with an African who had been away from his home continent for many years, Getting off the plane, entering the airport, he exclaimed, "The people have become so small!"
Africa has been so destroyed by dictators, wars, pollution that the population is on the move away from nature and food into shanty towns with running sewers. Sure, not everyone, not everywhere. Just where the "AIDS pandemic" is located.
Environmental medicine is considered a joke by the experts, but a total toxic environment has been created in parts of Africa. A land where starvation for generation after generation is the norm. Where traditional society and any form of comfort is long gone.
And guess what? The human immune system has suffered. After a while, some permanent damage remains. And the following generation is weaker.
But whole societies have suffered and starved before. What created the Perfect Storm in Africa?
Did I hear you say antibiotics? Africans know that antibiotics are one of the only two classes of medicine that work. They have been demanding them for decades. But Africa doesn't have a concerned government to regulate medical drugs. Anyone can get antibiotics and take them at the wrong doses for the wrong period of time. The antibiotic assault hit Africa harder than the US. Weaker people and stronger drugs were the unique "AIDS cocktail."
We could lament that we're all in for it now: sex is bad, drugs are bad, nature is bad.
But this website is called HEAL. We cannot help notice that every cell in our body is programmed to grow, live and reproduce. No matter that profit goads some to destroy sex, drugs and nature, our body exists to live. The aim of medicine was to comfort the body in sickness so that it could recover and resume growth, life and sex. The current fad for anti-life medicines to kill every bad thing in us kills everything good in us also.
HEAL meeting leaders declare that testing HIV+ is a wake-up call, not a death sentence.
Can you wake up enough to raise your head back up to see the road and apply just enough brake to round that blind curve ahead?
Sexual explorers practice "edging." It is staying just at the edge before "the little death."
It makes things last longer - getting there is half the fun. Can you see yourself sharpening your senses, making every minute count, making sex, drugs and nature better for yourself?
No! Not after the test, you say. Not after I've had HIV+ burned on my forehead, carved in my heart, punched into my genitals.
Well, let's look at what the test is (as opposed to what it does to people.)
From HIV Test-Kit Inserts:
“At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood.” (Abbott Lab HIV Test - ElA)
“The risk of an asymptomatic person with a repeatedly reactive serum developing AIDS or an AIDS-related condition is not known.” (Genetic Systems HIV Test - Peptide EIA)
“The AMPLICOR HIV-1 (PCR “Viral Load”) MONITOR test is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection” (Roche, Amplicor HIV Test Kit).
“Do not use this kit as the sole basis of diagnosis of HIV-1 infection.” (Epitope, Inc. HIV Test - Western Blot)
“Clinical studies continue to clarify and refine the interpretation and medical significance of the presence of antibodies to HIV.” (Abbott Laboratories HIV Test - ElA)
HIV Test Background
The first article in a respected scientific journal putting into question the value of the HIV Test was BIO/TECHNOLOGY (June 11, 1993).
It points out that you don't have to have HIV to test positive.
The authors found that the HIV antibody test does not yield consistent results, either within one laboratory (when a single sample is tested more than once), or between laboratories (when several laboratories test the same samples). One serum (blood) sample from the same person which was sent to 19 different laboratories yielded 19 different patterns of bands on the Western blot test.
Some of the groups which tend to test false-positive include: >IV drug users, >Africans, >malnurished, >TB, >MS, or >malaria patients, >multiple blood transfusion recipients, >people who have received a flu vaccine, >people who have had multiple infections.
The scientists state that the test is a measure of stress not specific to HIV. (HIV, by the way, has never been isolated.)
The implications are:
>Many lives have been changed for the worse because of an unreliable test.
>People who were said to have died from AIDS or HIV may have been killed by treatments such as AZT or early or aggressive treatment with toxic drugs such as AZT, ddI or ddC.