More De COCK AND BULL stuff and nonsense

In the face of undeniable facts about HIV/AIDS, cognitive dissonance and passionate defense of vested interests are eliciting from official sources statements that call for the talents of comedians in the tradition of Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, for appropriate commentary.

Kevin De Cock, for example, chief white-coated HIV/AIDS guru at the World Health Organization, said that “Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia . . .  That doesn’t look likely” [emphasis added] (Jeremy Laurence, “Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits”, Independent.co.uk, 8 June 2008 ).

What’s comical here is that De Cock and his cohorts at WHO and UNAIDS were themselves this “lot of people”, and that they were not only saying it but strenuously insisting on it, trumpeting it, repeating it incessantly and brooking no contradiction.

De Cock’s mention that Swaziland suffers an infection rate of  40% also deserves at least a snigger if not a belly laugh. He bemoans that fewer than one third of people in those African countries are getting the antiretroviral drugs they need. Of course even fewer were getting them until quite recently. Since Swaziland and other sub-Saharan countries have had these high rates for a decade or more in absence of treatment, there should by now be few people left alive there. Where then are all the corpses? Rian Malan (1) looked and couldn’t find them. And how did Africa’s population manage to continue to grow at a few percent per year despite all this carnage?

De Cock’s admission that HIV/AIDS is not going to spread outside Africa might have reflected his encounter with reality as co-author of the review article featured in HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, 29 April 2008. A colored graph in that article incorporates the assertion that HIV is disseminated by quite different means in different parts of the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, marital sex is indicted for more than 50% of the spread while commercial sex is responsible for only about 10%, whereas in Eastern Europe about 85% of transmission is owing to injection by drug addicts and only about 10% is ascribed to each of “casual sex” and sex between men—no noticeable amount from marital sex or from commercial sex, which latter is indicted in other parts of the world for between 10% and 20% of transmission. Aren’t some of the drug addicts in the former Warsaw pact countries married? Don’t they have sex with their wives? Are there no sex workers there? Don’t the injecting drug addicts there ever have sex with anyone, or do they have only homo-sex?

In both Latin American and the Caribbean, sex between men is supposed to be responsible for about 60% of the spread—but the overall rate in Latin America is twice that in the Caribbean. Is the proportion of gay men in the Latin American population twice that in the Caribbean?

One shouldn’t in any case speak of any spread at all in those regions, given that there has been no reported increase for at least a decade. UNAIDS in its Global Reports and Updates reported for HIV in Latin America, 0.5% for both 1997 and 2007; in the Caribbean, 1.9% in 1997 and only 1.0% for 2007.

Mother-to-child transmission, according to that review article, accounts for 15% of all transmission in sub-Saharan Africa but is barely noticeable in Latin America and the Caribbean and is not even mentioned for Asia and Eastern Europe. Yet in Asia, 25% of transmission is supposed to be via marital sex. How does it come about that all those married women infected via marital sex never pass their infection on to their newborns?

Someone like De Cock who collaborated in authorship of this review article would, I suggest, find unbidden doubts making themselves felt about the whole business of HIV/AIDS epidemics; albeit those doubts might express themselves only in dreams—or nightmares.

Expressing such doubts in the light of day, and from within the World Health Organization, is tantamount to treason. No surprise, then, that WHO and UNAIDS quickly issued a joint “correction” (“Correction to AIDS story in Independent article 8 June 2008; Joint Note for the Media WHO/UNAIDS - Wed, 11 Jun 2008”).

This correction reiterates that “the global HIV epidemic is by no means over. . . . AIDS remains the leading cause of death in Africa. . . . Worldwide, HIV is still largely driven by heterosexual transmission. The majority of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa occur through heterosexual transmission. We have also seen a number of generalized epidemics outside of Africa, such as in Haiti and Papua New Guinea.”

But this in no way speaks to, let alone contradicts, De Cock’s admission that there are not and will not be heterosexual epidemics in the Americas, Asia, Australia, or Europe. That takes all the wind out of the sails of this “correction”; and the last assertion in this press release deserves to be laughed off the stage:
“AIDS remains the leading infectious disease challenge in global health. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible and misleading.”

As already pointed out in our earlier post (WHO SAYS that WE’VE BEEN VERY WRONG about HIV and AIDS? (Clue: WHO = World Health Organization), 10 June 2008 ), numerous official sources have presented evidence over and over again that more people even in Africa die of malaria and other scourges traditionally present there, than die of AIDS.

Peter Piot, collaborator with de Cock in creating “the Belgian disease” of HIV/AIDS in Africa, seems to have acted with better self-preservation instincts than De Cock: “In a little noticed statement in April, Piot said he would step down when his term ended at the end of this year” (“June 11, 2008: First shoe at UN drops: Peter Piot resigns”  and “Liam Scheff at GNN: The Aids machine grinds to a halt” ). When a Director of UNAIDS and Under-Secretary of the United Nations steps down with a “little noticed statement”, something is awry. Why not the traditional press-release citing his desire to spend more time with his family after having accomplished all that he had aimed to accomplish? That no successor was announced amplifies the smell of fish here, in  its indication of haste and confusion rather than orderly transition at the normal end of a term of service.

The cat is out of the bag. HIV is not fueling heterosexually transmitted epidemics—at least not in most of the world. Outside sub-Saharan Africa, heterosexual epidemics are apparent only among other dark-skinned people, according to WHO/UNAIDS in Haiti and Papua New Guinea. It’s just shameful what those black people do in the way of sex—particularly those married ones in sub-Saharan Africa, see TO AVOID HIV INFECTION, DON’T GET MARRIED, 18 November; HIV/AIDS ABSURDITIES AND WORSE, 9 DECEMBER 2007; B***S*** about HIV from ACADEME via THE PRESS, 4 March 2008.
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Citation:
(1) Rian Malan, “AIDS in Africa: In search of the truth” Rolling Stone Magazine, 22 November 2001; “Africa isn’t dying of Aids”, The Spectator (London), 14 December 2003.

COCAINE AND HEROIN AREN’T GOOD FOR YOU! — a Golden Fleece Award

My generation of scientists was familiar with the Golden Fleece Awards bestowed by Senator William Proxmire on federally funded research to find answers that were already known or on topics of no importance. Proxmire would certainly have given an award for the work described by the headline,

HIV-positive illicit drug users have increased risk for opportunistic infections, death, study says (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 8 March 2006)

When Google Alerts delivered me this headline, I naturally inferred that the study had found that “HIV”-positive drug users had a poorer prognosis than HIV-negative drug users. That would have made this just another study showing that if you were “HIV”-positive you were more likely to be ill than if you were HIV-negative, given that testing “HIV”-positive is a sign of physiological stress, albeit not necessarily serious enough to worry about unless your physician decided that you needed to take antiretroviral drugs. Moreover it would have been consistent with several reports that “HIV”-positive drug addicts reverted to HIV-negative, as well as to better health, upon conquering the addiction.

Imagine my delight, not to say surprise, on finding that my inference was dead wrong:

“HIV-positive users of cocaine and heroine have an increased risk for opportunistic infections and death compared with HIV-positive nonusers, according to a study published in the January 4 on-line edition of the American Journal of Epidemiology, Reuters reports. Gregory Lucas of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues surveyed a total of 1,851 HIV-positive individuals every six months starting in 1998. Researchers grouped the participants into different categories: 1,028 ‘nonusers’; 588 ‘intermittent users,’ who had used illicit drugs an average of 14 days in the last six months; and 235 ‘persistent users,’ who had used illicit drugs an average of 27 days in the last six months. After three years, researchers found that the approximate survival rates were 87% for nonusers, 80% for intermittent users and 68% for persistent users. After adjusting for various factors — including age, race, gender and CD4+ T-cell counts — researchers found that the risk of death was almost double in intermittent users and almost triple in persistent users. During periods when users abstained from illicit drug use, the risk of opportunistic infections decreased to the level associated with nonusers, according to the study.”

Imagine that!

Congress, The National Drug Enforcement Agency, indeed all law enforcement entities, as well as the NGOs that preach “Just say NO to drugs”, will be greatly relieved at this proof that their work has actually had a genuinely substantive basis. No longer need they worry, whether they have an objective basis for their animus against cocaine, crack, crystal, heroin, etc., etc.—now it’s been scientifically proven at last that those substances are health-threatening.

“The observed increase in risk might be attributed to the effect illicit drugs have on the immune system…”
Well. Yes, that seems plausible enough.

But let us not overlook that this whole study involved “HIV”-positive people. So the really major question is, how do cocaine and heroin interfere with treating HIV? So, as Jon Stewart of the Daily Show would say, “Here’s your moment of Zen”:

“The observed increase in risk might be attributed to … failure to adhere to antiretroviral therapy”.

So therefore:

“Effectively targeting and treating active substance abuse in HIV treatment settings may provide a mechanism to improve clinical outcomes”.

Would anyone disagree?

Would anyone have disagreed before this study was ever done??

WHO SAYS that WE’VE BEEN VERY WRONG about HIV and AIDS? (Clue: WHO = World Health Organization)

“A 25-year health campaign was misplaced. . . . there will be no generalised epidemic of AIDS in the heterosexual population outside Africa. . . . outside sub-Saharan Africa [the threat of AIDS] . . . was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

… the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared. . .

Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia . . . That doesn’t look likely. . . .

In 2006, the Global Fund for HIV, Malaria and Tuberculosis . . . warned that Russia was on the cusp of a catastrophe. . . . it is unlikely there will be extensive heterosexual spread in Russia. . . .

the factors driving HIV [are] still not fully understood. . . .

In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. . . . How do you explain such differences?”

No, these are not statements and questions from “deniers”, “dissidents”, “denialists”, rethinkers, or other outsiders. They are from Dr. Kevin De Cock, head of the World Health Organization’s department of HIV/AIDS (Jeremy Laurance, “Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits”, Independent.co.uk, 8 June 2008 [’ve changed the British usage, “aids”, to “AIDS” throughout]).

Not only does De Cock hold that authoritative position at WHO, he has been in the forefront of HIV/AIDS research from the very beginning. Indeed, he is at the forefront of those who are demonstrably culpable for promulgating a notion that underpins the whole HIV/AIDS house of cards, namely, the notion of a “virus out of Africa” which was created on the basis of zero evidence as well as high implausibility.

As the Chirimuutas* pointed out long ago, the conceit that 1980s outbreaks in a few American cities stemmed from a virus brought back to the United States by tourists ignores the fact that Africans had been transported to the United States long before that; that people from many parts of Africa had been visiting and residing in the United States for many decades; that the back-and-forth people traffic between Africa and colonial European powers had been far more intense, and had gone on far longer, than between Africa and America, so that an imported-from-Africa virus would have done its first damage in Europe, not America. And, after all, none of the early 1980s AIDS victims had ever been to Africa.

Furthermore, De Cock’s explanation, for why AIDS was not noticed or identified in Africa before it traveled to the United States, ignorantly indicted African medicine for incompetence in diagnosis of even such endemic diseases as malaria. De Cock also suggested that Africans had adjusted physiologically in some way to cope with the disease better than Americans could, which hardly explains why AIDS supposedly devastates Africa but not America or Europe.

The book by the Chirimuutas, chock-full of citations of peer-reviewed literature, is a stunning exposé of how early Belgian researchers in Africa—Peter Piot as well as De Cock—laid the groundwork for decades of misguided research through their thoroughly incompetent activities. More recent articles make many of the same points: “Is AIDS African?” (1997); “AIDS and Africa: A case of racism vs. science? AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean 1997”

Piot has been Executive Director of UNAIDS since its creation in 1995 as well as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. Given his and De Cock’s role in creating it, perhaps HIV/AIDS should be known as “the Belgian disease”.

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Reality has now intruded so forcibly that De Cock can no longer avoid the fact that AIDS epidemics have not happened, those epidemics that he and his cohorts prophesied with such overweening confidence for more than two decades. But— cognitive dissonance once again!—he also cannot recognize that this fact undermines the whole HIV/AIDS scenario. De Cock describes as “four malignant arguments” some certifiable truths cited by critics: that official data have inflated all HIV/AIDS estimates and that HIV/AIDS has diverted funds from such obvious needs as malaria prevention and the provision of clean water and food, building infrastructure, and sensible public-health programs; even then, plain reality forces De Cock to admit that there are “elements of truth” in these criticisms.

Nevertheless—recall what cognitive dissonance involves, HIV/AIDS ILLUSTRATES COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, 29 April 2008 —De Cock still asserts that AIDS “remains the leading infectious disease challenge in public health” , even as he knows that it is no threat outside Africa and in the face of at least equally authoritative assertions by others that malaria and malnutrition kill far more Africans than “AIDS” does (A SMALL HITCH IN THE BANDWAGON?, 29 May 2008; WHY UNAIDS SHOULD BE DISBANDED, 31 May 2008 ).

De Cock’s muddled state of mind manages only to recognize that something doesn’t fit:

“The biggest puzzle was what had caused heterosexual spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa—with infection rates exceeding 40 per cent of adults in Swaziland, the worst-affected country—but nowhere else. . . . Sexual behaviour . . . doesn’t seem to explain [all] the differences between populations.”

Yet having acknowledged that sexual behavior isn’t the explanation, he resorts to sexual behavior as an explanation:

“more commercial sex workers, more ulcerative sexually transmitted diseases, a young population and concurrent sexual partnerships. . . . Even if the total number of sexual partners [in sub-Saharan Africa] is no greater than in the UK, there seems to be a higher frequency of overlapping sexual partnerships”.

Regarding that shibboleth about multiple concurrent overlapping partnerships, not only is there no evidence for such multiple overlapping concurrencies, there is strong evidence against the assumption; see earlier posts, in particular RACE and SEXUAL BEHAVIOR: STEREOTYPE vs. FACT, 27 May 2008.

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The epidemiology is so clear that even such insiders as James Chin++ and Kevin De Cock can’t make it jibe with HIV/AIDS theory. And since— remember, cognitive dissonance—they cannot admit to themselves that they have been utterly and entirely wrong, so too can they not find a way to admit publicly that they have been utterly and entirely wrong. But their attempts to cope with the evidence inevitably become more and more absurd, and the whole enterprise begins to crumble, as insiders from specialties that compete with them for funds begin to raise their voices (A SMALL HITCH IN THE BANDWAGON?, 29 May 2008; WHY UNAIDS SHOULD BE DISBANDED, 31 May 2008 ).

* Richard and Rosalind Chirimuuta, AIDS, Africa and Racism, Free Association Books (London), 1989 (2nd ed., revised). Rosalind Harrison (Chirimuuta) is a diplomate in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, specialized in ophthalmology, and presently a consultant with the British Health Service

++ Re Chin, see for example B***S*** about HIV from ACADEME via THE PRESS, 4 March 2008

Acknowledgment: Many thanks to the several people who alerted me to the article in the Independent.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

HIV/AIDS has an unparalleled ability to generate grants and gifts.

The Global Fund has approved nearly $29 million, and actually disbursed already $16 million, to help fight HIV/AIDS in the hard-hit land of Kyrgyzstan.

According to the CIA Fact Book, by 2003 there were in Kyrgyzstan an estimated 3900 people living with HIV/AIDS, there had been fewer than 200 HIV/AIDS deaths, and the prevalence was estimated at < 0.1% (as low as anywhere in the world). So the Global Fund’s allocation to Kyrgyzstan, at $29 million, represents about $150,000 per death and about $7000 per patient.

While that may seem excessively generous, perhaps it was guided by the budgeting of the National Institutes of Health, which called in 2007 for about $180,000 per AIDS death in the United States (allocations for other diseases were, for example, just under $10,000 per cancer death and $2600 per cardiovascular death—see STOPPING THE HIV/AIDS BANDWAGON—-Part II, 1 February 2008.

The threat to Kyrgyzstan from HIV/AIDS is further illustrated by the suspected infection of 26 babies in two hospitals (HIV-POSITIVE CHILDREN, HIV-NEGATIVE MOTHERS, 25 November 2007) and the even more terrifying fact that these babies might then infect their mothers through being breast-fed (BABIES INFECT MOTHERS; CRAZY THEORY RUINS LIVES, 12 April 2008 ).

ANTHONY FAUCI EXPLAINS RACIAL DISPARITIES IN “HIV/AIDS”

(Several references below — euphemism, minority, macacas — are more fully explained in the earlier post, HIV/AIDS IS INESCAPABLY RACIST, 19 May 2008 ).

Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has appeared often on the public-radio Diane Rehm show. For example, on 27 November 2007, he was introduced thus (“HIV/AIDS Worldwide”, transcript by Soft Scribe LLC):

“Racial and ethnic minorities continue to be disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic here in the U.S. New figures show that African Americans are among those who are most at risk. Here in Washington, D.C. 1 in 20 residents is thought to have the HIV, and 1 in 50 to have AIDS.”

Once again (see HIV/AIDS IS INESCAPABLY RACIST), that euphemism “minority”. Already the following sentence shows that actually meant is black. (In Washington, DC, blacks comprise a majority of the population.)

Fauci said that “in the District, about 37 - 39 percent [of ‘HIV-positive’ results from] heterosexual transmission, 20-some-odd percent men who have sex with men, and about 14 percent injection-drug users. . . . [This] resembles in some respects . . . what we see in third world countries. And the confluence of an inner city area with poverty, lack of healthcare access, injection-drug use which keeps a core of infection in the city, and then that’s spread heterosexually and then from there you get secondary and tertiary heterosexual spread” [emphasis added].

Once more: “complex social mixing patterns” (see HIV/AIDS IS INESCAPABLY RACIST) are postulated in these “minority” communities whose conditions happen to resemble those in Third-World countries (euphemism for sub-Saharan Africa).

Another remark by Fauci illustrates how content the mainstream is to assert as fact what cannot be known: “there is a disproportional amount of transmission from people who do not know that they are infected”.
STOP.
THINK.
They don’t know they’re infected. No one told them. Why not? Because no one else knows, either.
What Fauci asserts could only be assumed, not actually known; and it is also and first assumed that there’s a short period of undetectable infection but high infectivity just after being infected; because that’s the only way to cope with the undeniable fact that the average probability of apparently transmitting the “HIV-positive” condition is only about 1 per 1000 acts of unprotected intercourse, far too low a probability to sustain any sort of epidemic (14 May 2008, SEX, RACE, and “HIV”).

(”Don’t know they’re infected” reminded me of the study that found “Nine in 10 students who experienced hazing . . . did not think they had been hazed”; Chronicle of Higher Education 21 March 2008, p. A21)

Fauci again: “disproportional amount, more of poverty, lack of access to medical care, a lack of access to counseling for prevention, proximity in locations in inner city for example where there are pockets of injection-drug use . . . . among blacks … being gay and having gay sex is not as accepted … as it is in the society as a whole”.

Again: it’s so but it ain’t “their” fault.

More Fauci: “a misconception that because women get infected in this community that they are leading promiscuous lives. That’s certainly not the case in general. Very often it’s someone who is being monogamous with someone who happens to be infected”.

“Very often”: How often must a monogamous woman have sex with an infected partner to become positive, when the probability is about 1 per 1000? James Chin, epidemiologist, says the contrary. To produce the alleged levels and rapidity of spread, 20-40% of people must be engaged in multiple concurrent relationships with frequent partner change (4 March 2008, B***S*** about HIV from ACADEME via THE PRESS). Doesn’t that qualify as quite promiscuous?

Over and again, Fauci pretends to believe that it’s not their fault, it’s their culture — “very often women want their male sexual partner to use a condom, but they won’t do it. And in certain cultures it is not easy for a woman to assert herself and say, ‘No, this is the way it’s going to be. We don’t have a condom, I’m not having sex.’ They can wind up getting abused as it were. Those are the kind of cultural barriers that we need to overcome” (emphasis added).
(1) How does Fauci know that this happens “very often”?
(2) Again it’s those macaca cultures, which are apparently ensconced just as powerfully in Washington, DC, among people whose ancestors left Africa many generations ago, as among those still now living in Africa.

Fauci: “68 percent of the infections in the world occur in southern Africa. . . . it has to do with cultural and other factors. Poverty, dissolution of the family units, post-colonization where people would leave the family and go and work in mines, go on the trucking routes, get exposed to commercial sex workers, bring the infection back to their family, infect their wives, lack of prevention modalities. . . . some very good studies about sexual activities that in certain cultures, including those in Southern Africa there is what’s called overlapping concurrent multiple sexual partners. If you have a society that has sequential sexual partners, it is much less likely to have explosive transmission than when you have people who have simultaneously multiple sexual partners that you share.
…
there is a degree of disenfranchisement . . . There is discrimination . . . communities in which there is crime, there is murder . . . .”

Once more, it’s those other cultures that do sex differently than “we” do; and those cultures in Washington DC and in southern Africa share the common factor of people with dark-hued skin. As documented in my book, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, Native Americans suffer even more than African Americans from violent crime and disenfranchisement and abuse of alcohol and drugs, but their rate of testing “HIV-positive” is far below that of blacks and not much higher than among whites. It’s the biological race that matters, not the “minority” “culture”.

Note once again the asserting, as fact, matters that are speculative. “Overlapping concurrent multiple sexual partners” have been postulated to explain spread of “HIV” among heterosexuals. I await citation of those “very good studies” that actually found that sort of situation which — recall James Chin’s calculations (14 May 2008, SEX, RACE, and “HIV”) — require 20-40% of adults to be behaving in this fashion if “HIV” is to spread. Such a rate of promiscuity would be evident to the most casual observer, yet it has not been reported by any observers.

Fauci virtually confessed his belief that race and cultural determinants of sexual behavior go together:

FAUCI: it’s very difficult when you have societies whose cultural approach to life has been going on for centuries that you are going to all of a sudden change sexual practices.
REHM: But I don’t think we ought to single out sub-Saharan Africa.
FAUCI: No, not, of course not, anywhere.
REHM: I mean, here in Washington –
REHM: — that kind of promiscuous sex –
FAUCI: Right, and –
REHM: — is going on.
FAUCI: Right, exactly.

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Anthony Fauci and many others, including those who speak for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appear willing to ascribe racial disparities in “HIV-positive” to “cultural” factors, even though those disparities transcend all social milieus and all geographic boundaries and all age groups and are seen in both sexes. Would they also ascribe to “cultural” factors characteristic of Caucasians that whites always test “HIV-positive” anywhere from 50% to 300% more often than Asians? Could it be that Caucasians are inherently more given to “multiple concurrent sexual relationships” than Asians are?