by Paul Philpott
We are told that HIV-caused AIDS is ravaging the African continent.
The dominant opposing view is that AIDS there is caused never by
HIV, but rather by two primary factors:
(1) The same old things there that have always caused wasting,
tuberculosis, chronic fever, persistent coughing, prolonged diarrhea,
and other official AIDS conditions: malnutrition, poor public sanitation,
recurrent tropical infections requiring toxic medications, and untreated
drinking water contaminated with all manner of parasites.
(2) Recreational drug consumption, particularly among sex workers
and others living in urban settings.
This view is consistent with the medical literature, which shows
that "AIDS in Africa" occurs mostly in people who turn
out to be HIV-negative.
A particularly impressive short report was published in the October
17, 1992 issue of Britain's prestigious medical journal Lancet
[vol. 340, p971]. A team of Japanese researchers examined 227 Ghanaians
diagnosed as having AIDS based on clinical symptoms, without benefit
of HIV tests. When the Japanese showed up with HIV testing equipment,
they performed on each patient "multiple laboratory diagnostic
tests."
The result: 59% were negative for both HIV-1 and HIV-2!
"All the patients had three major signs: weight loss, prolonged
diarrhea, and chronic fever," the report stated. "Many
of them also had other AIDS-associated signs, such as lymphodenopathy,
tuberculosis, dermatological diseases, and neurological disorders,
though CD4 cells were not counted because of insufficient facilities."
The authors concluded that "The existence of other agents
causing AIDS-like syndromes might be possible among these so-called
HIV-negative cases."
It simply never occurred to them that the symptoms expressing in
the HIV-positive patients might be brought on by the "other
agents" causing the same symptoms in the HIV-negative cases,
or that those "other agents" might be non-contagious factors
common to them all, such as malnutrition and poor sanitation.
A second report, in a 1994 issue of the Journal of AIDS
[7:8, p876], was just as damning to the official view. The authors
examined frozen blood samples from 913 "suspected AIDS/HIV-infected
patients" from "towns [with] the highest number of reported
cases in Kenya."
No explanation was offered for what was meant by "suspected
AIDS/HIV-infected patients." Apparently the patients all qualified
as AIDS based on clinical symptoms, like the Ghanaian patients,
or else they would not have been "suspected" of having
AIDS or being HIV-positive. Unlike in the US, AIDS diagnoses in
Africa are typically made without HIV testing due to lack of laboratory
equipment.
When investigators subjected the blood samples to rigorous HIV
testing (the scientists were from the World Health Organization
Reference Laboratory for AIDS) they found that 71% were HIV-negative
. The authors did not comment the obvious implications of their
data.
A 1993 study of 122 tuberculosis (TB) patients in Nairobi, Kenya
yielded similar results. Sixty-nine percent of the patients were
HIV-negative. The authors observed that "the differences that
exist between HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients are minor"
[American Review of Respiratory Disease 147, p958].
This is significant because TB is an official AIDS condition: a
TB patient who is HIV-positive automatically qualifies for an "AIDS"
diagnosis.
Why did these 122 residents of the same town develop TB? Does it
really make sense to automatically blame HIV whenever it is found?
Is there any logical basis for dismissing the majority of HIV-free
cases that occur in the same population as resulting from a separate
underlying cause?
Even in the face of a preponderance of HIV-negative patients, questioning
the role of HIV in AIDS was inconceivable to the authors of these
studies.
It occurs to us that "AIDS in Africa" is a contrivance
that involves subjecting sickly populations to HIV tests, and arbitrarily
declaring "AIDS" whenever positive results are achieved.