B***S*** about HIV from ACADEME via THE PRESS

A few years ago, Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Princeton, earned his 15 minutes of popular fame by publishing a little chapbook with the captivating title, “On Bullshit”. I avoided it on the general principle that anything which attracts that sort of media attention cannot be worth spending time over. But a year later, a trustworthy friend gave me a copy of the book. Its first sentence told me nothing new:

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

But I read on, and am glad that I did, because I found Frankfurt’s definition of B***S*** genuinely enlightening: B***S*** is not a matter of lies or deception, it is a lack of concern with the truth; B***S***ers just don’t care whether what they say is true or untrue or neither.

“Spin”, incessantly emitted by politicians and corporations and advertisers is B***S*** in this sense; what Presidential Press Secretaries say is B***S*** in this sense.

One corollary is that “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about”. And that, of course, is a sufficient explanation for why there’s so much B***S*** in our culture.

Assertions about HIV/AIDS by activists and in the popular media are rife with B***S***, because so many of the speakers don’t know what they are talking about and don’t care that they don’t know. They have accepted without question, taken on trust, what the white-coated gurus have told them, and believe they are serving the greater good by “empowering”, “mobilizing”, spreading “awareness”, urging “prevention”, and so on, doings that have an undeniably feel-good ring to them even as they defy attempts to understand what is meant in terms of tangible actions or tangible results.

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The foregoing diatribe was stimulated by an Editorial in a newspaper that isn’t always nor typically in the business †:

“Married to HIV: President Bush’s Africa plan doesn’t acknowledge that often it’s husbands who infect wives”[Los Angeles Times, 22 February 2008]
“Religious groups are fixated on the need to stop HIV transmission through premarital and extramarital sex, but what’s killing African women by the millions is unprotected sex with their husbands. . . . Roughly 10 million African girls under the age of 18 are married each year, many to older men who seek HIV-free brides. To those wedded to HIV-positive men, marriage often means a death sentence. . . . they are more likely than young men to contract HIV.”

The UNAIDS “AIDS Epidemic Update” of December 2006 asserts that in 2004 and 2006, there were attributable to HIV/AIDS 2 million deaths of adults and children in sub-Saharan Africa. The L. A. Times, by stating “millions” of unfortunate wives in the present tense (“what’s killing”), is implicitly attributing most of these annual 2 million to unprotected sex among married couples. This is patently absurd. The editorial ghost-writer need not have read our blog (TO AVOID HIV INFECTION, DON’T GET MARRIED, 18 November 2007) to realize just how absurd this is, it would have been enough to have a concern for what the truth is, which might have led to looking at the official and readily available statistics. A concern for what the truth is might also be a stimulus to engage in thought.

I wonder on what data is based the assertion of “often means a death sentence”? How many such marriages and how many such deaths?
This typifies the B***S*** that “HIV/AIDS activists” indulge in habitually: the aim is to arouse emotion, no matter that the assertions are based on nothing but belief and guesswork.

I wonder, too, whether that ghost-writer saw any problem in asserting the dangers of sex with older men who are anxious to avoid HIV while also asserting that young men are less at risk of infection than are young women. If those older men are anxious to avoid contracting HIV, and have managed to do so during evidently long years of sexual activity, and were in any case less likely than their young female peers to contract HIV, what possible reason could there be to indict them as a class for posing any danger to their young brides? As we said on 18 November 2007, “we are being asked to believe . . . [that] the very same generation which as unmarried singles enabled the infection rate to decrease because of their scrupulously careful sexual behavior became, a few years later and when married, riotously and carelessly promiscuous”.

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The on-line version of this Editorial has a link to DJSmith.pdf, a document devoid of authorial by-line that bears the title “Modern Marriage, Men’s Extramarital Sex, and HIV Risk in Southeastern Nigeria”. The clue given by the file-name, however, permitted me to discover that this was published in the American Journal of Public Health (97 [2007] 997-1005) by Daniel Jordan Smith of the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. The abstract is a run-of-the-mill example of postmodern academic B***S***:

“For women in Nigeria, as in many settings, simply being married can contribute to the risk of contracting HIV. I studied men’s extramarital sexual behavior in the context of modern marriage in southeastern Nigeria. The results indicate that the social organization of infidelity is shaped by economic inequality, aspirations for modern lifestyles, gender disparities, and contradictory moralities. It is men’s anxieties and ambivalence about masculinity, sexual morality, and social reputation in the context of seeking modern lifestyles—rather than immoral sexual behavior and traditional culture—that exacerbate the risks of HIV/AIDS.”

Try to think of specific actions or connections that might warrant the generalizations expressed in the last two sentences (provided you can even detect what their meaning is intended to be). Of course, if you are a postmodern academic, you don’t need to concern yourself with evidence to support such generalizations, you just need to frame your writings in the contexts of “race, class, and gender” to ensure publication. If you think that’s an exaggeration, please read up on the Sokal affair, where an absurd parody passed muster for publication in the journal Social Text ‡.

At any rate, the scholarly publication that the L. A. Times ghost-writer apparently relied on suggests that married women in Nigeria are at particular risk of catching “HIV” because of the prevailing cultural milieu. A skeptic about how much reliance can be placed on “participant observer” reports and face-to-face interviews about sexual behavior (“Marital case studies were conducted with 20 couples”) might question the data and venture doubts about the conclusions, but that is really beside the point since the descriptions of those matters seem entirely applicable to Western cultures where married women are not at particular risk of catching HIV:

“In southeastern Nigeria marriage is sacred, and yet men’s infidelity is common”
—think certain prominent American televangelists

“a pronounced double standard with regard to extramarital sexuality”

“marriage remains the single most important marker of moral adulthood in Nigeria, [and therefore] both policymakers and ordinary citizens remain resistant to the idea that marriage must be understood as a risk factor for HIV infection”

“Most couples seek to portray their marriages to themselves and to others as being modern but also moral, and this is crucial to explaining the dynamics of men’s extramarital sexual relationships, married women’s responses to men’s infidelity, and the risk of HIV infection in marriage”

“Many men were ambivalent about their extramarital sexual behavior, but in most cases men viewed it as acceptable given an appropriate degree of prudence so as not to disgrace one’s spouse, one’s self, and one’s family”
—[note “prudence”]

“[that] a significant proportion of extramarital sex in southeastern Nigeria involves relationships that have emotional and moral dimensions—they are not just about sex—means that men imagine these relationships, their partners, and themselves in ways that are quite distanced from the prevailing local model that the greatest risk for HIV/AIDS comes from ‘immoral’ sex”
—in other words, “a significant proportion” of marital infidelity is not the supposedly really risky behavior with prostitutes or “on the down-low”. What’s described is more reminiscent of the French tradition of essentially life-long lovers or mistresses than it is of the rampant promiscuity with multiple concurrent but changing partners that is ascribed to 20-40% of the sub-Saharan population in order to explain the purported spread of “HIV” (see “The AIDS Pandemic” by James Chin, formerly epidemiologist for the State of California and the World Health Organization).

Indeed, the article admits that “On its face, marriage in southeastern Nigeria seems to be changing in ways that make it increasingly similar to marriage in Western societies”, hardly a promising direction in which to pursue an explanation for a high risk of catching HIV by marrying.

Smith’s article begins, “Data from around the world, including Nigeria, suggest that married women’s greatest risk of contracting HIV is through having sex with their husbands”; but the cited reference is a Nigerian document, which in fact shows a higher rate of HIV-positive among single women than among married ones in every region of Nigeria (Figure 11, p. 45, 2003 National HIV Sero-prevalence Sentinel Survey, April 2004).

Apart from those objective flaws, the text has similar postmodern usages as the Abstract, for example:

“Male extramarital sexual practices are situated in economic, social and moral contexts, showing how the social organization of extramarital sexuality is itself located at the intersection of economic inequality, aspirations for modern lifestyles, gender disparities, and commanding and contradictory moralities….The data demonstrate that married men’s risky sexual behavior and their wives’ inability to protect themselves can be understood and explained without resorting to blaming the victims.”

The conclusions in Smith’s article are not only ironic but also repeat the usual self-contradictions that are inseparable from mainstream discourse about HIV/AIDS:

“Ironically, the HIV epidemic has further complicated possibilities for condom use because, in a context where the risk of HIV is popularly associated with sexual immorality, suggesting a condom is tantamount to asserting that one’s partner is risky and, hence, guilty of sexual impropriety. . . . Perhaps the most important step is to design interventions that help reduce the popular association of HIV risk with immoral sexual behavior”.

Once again that extraordinary breach of logic:
“X” is spread by unsafe promiscuous sex, which society regards as immoral. The way to stop “X” from spreading is to persuade people that there’s nothing immoral about the behavior that leads to its spread.
In many other contexts, this same idiocy is expressed by talking about the need to remove the stigma associated with testing HIV-positive (see, for instance, HIV NONSENSE: TODAY AND EVERY DAY, 22 November 2007).
When will we hear propaganda to that effect about gonorrhea or syphilis?

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Footnotes:

† The L. A. Times does not typically engage in B***S***ing . . . except regarding HIV/AIDS, that is to say; recall, for example, its scurrilous and unsubstantiated stories about Christine Maggiore

‡ Instructive articles about the Sokal hoax include Paul Boghossian, Times Literary Supplement, 13 December 1996, 14-15 and Steven Weinberg, New York Review, 8 August 1996, 11-14. The hoax article itself is “Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”, Social Text 46-47, Spring/Summer 1996, p. 217 ff. Sokal revealed the hoax as soon as it was published, in “A physicist experiments with cultural studies”, Lingua Franca, May/June 1995, 62-64.

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Postscript:
As happens to me so often, checking a source brings unforeseeable benefits. One of the most curious regularities in rates of testing HIV-positive is the apparently universal trend to higher rates at higher population densities, which I first noted in the US data (The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory)http://failingsofhivaidstheory.homestead.com/ and then found reported also in Rwanda (see HIV DEMOGRAPHICS FURTHER CONFIRMED: HIV IS NOT SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED, 26 February 2008). It popped up again in Nigeria, where this trend was found in six of the country’s seven regions, with ratios for urban/rural rates averaging 1.7 (0.87 to 3.8, Figure 2 in “2003 National HIV Sero-prevalence Sentinel Survey”).

HIV DEMOGRAPHICS FURTHER CONFIRMED: HIV IS NOT SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED

The rates at which people in the United States test HIV-positive have remained at about the same level, and have remained distributed geographically in the same manner, for two decades. The rates also vary with age, sex, and race in the same manner in all social groups. Those demographics are characteristic of something endemic, not of something contagious that causes epidemics; thus “HIV” is not something that’s sexually transmitted (see also WHAT “HIV” IS NOT: IT’S NOT SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED, 6 January 2008).

That demographics-based argument, detailed in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland 2007), is strongly confirmed by finding similar demographic characteristics in Africa as in the United States.

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Consider how testing HIV-positive varies with age and sex:

Sexually transmitted diseases tend to strike adolescents and young adults more than others; by contrast, rates of HIV-positive are highest in newborns and in middle-aged people.

Resistance to infections and illnesses is greatest among adults in the prime and middle years of life; old people are at particular risk for flu, pneumonia, etc. The very opposite applies with HIV: the risk of testing HIV-positive is greatest in middle age.

The above diagram describes general trends. As noted in the source (The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theoryhttp://failingsofhivaidstheory.homestead.com/), there are some variations: “The only major variation between groups is in the precise ‘middle’ age at which F(HIV) peaks, anywhere from 30s to 50s; and that precise age is not always the same for males and females. . . . There are also hints . . . that the peak ages and the male-to-female ratios may be somewhat different in the various racial categories” (pp. 26-7); “black women test positive relatively frequently under some sort of not-necessarily-serious physiological stress, such as pregnancy or childbirth” (p. 247).

Those very same trends can be seen in the Demographic and Health Survey for Rwanda (2005 edition, published July 2006; available at http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pub_details.cfm?ID=594&srchTp=).

The data from the United States contained hints that black women are particularly prone to test HIV-positive; the Rwanda data confirm that strongly—women there test HIV-positive more often than men up to age 40, whereas in the United States women test positive more often than men only up to the later teens.

Then there’s the variation with marital status (from Table 15.6, Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey, 2005):

As earlier remarked (TO AVOID HIV INFECTION, DON’T GET MARRIED, 18 November 2007), this illustrates the usual variation with age: the widowed are likely to be on average older than the divorced, who are likely to be on average older than those currently married or in a stable relationship, who are likely to be older than those who never had sex. Note, too, that 2 per 1000 men, and 8 per 1000 women, have contracted this supposed STD without ever having had sex.

Yet another confirmation of this variation of HIV-positive with age is reported by Brewer et al., Annals of Epidemiology, 17 (2007) 217-26. The following rates of testing HIV-positive (as percentages) are extracted from their Table 5:

All show the increase with age from teens into “middle age” (which is in the 30s except with Tanzanian males and uncircumcised Kenyan males). Only 1 cell out of 32 (18-24-year-old circumcised Kenyan males) does not fit the pattern, a remarkably consistent, reproducible result for such a demographic variable.

In the Kenya data, note that uncircumcised females test positive more often than males only up to the late teens, which is more like the US data than the Rwandan; whereas in the circumcised group, females test positive more often than males into the thirties, which is more like the Rwandan data than the US data.

Note too how irreproducible is the variation of HIV-positive rate with circumcision status; in 6 cases, circumcised corresponds to a greater HIV-positive rate, in the other 10 cases it is the opposite.

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Among the surprises in the US demographic data was the consistent increase of HIV-positive rates with increasing population density (which is again not characteristic of sexually transmitted diseases). Such a correlation is, however, consistent with an explanation of HIV-positive as a non-specific physiological response to a variety of minor and major insults such as environmental pollution (see p. 89 in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).http://failingsofhivaidstheory.homestead.com/

Remarkably, the same trend with population density is found in Rwanda:
“in 1986 . . . [rates of HIV-positive] were 17.8 percent in urban areas and 1.3 percent in rural areas. . . . In . . . 1991 . . . 27 percent in urban areas, 8.5 percent in semi-urban areas, and 2.2 percent in rural areas. . . . in 1996 . . . 27 percent among urban residents, 13 percent among semi-urban residents, and 6.9 percent among rural residents”; in 2002, 7.0-8.5% in urban areas and 2.6-3.6% in rural areas; in 2003, 6.9-8.3% urban, 2.7-3.6% rural.

The overall rates in 2005 were reported as 2.6 rural and 8.6 urban for women, and 1.6 rural and 5.8 urban for women. This makes the urban-to-rural ratio 3.3 for women and 3.6 for men, so similar that it speaks against any interpretation in terms of different sexual behavior by men and women. Moreover, these ratios are uncannily similar to the approximate ratio of 4 found in the United States (p. 67 in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

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Religion:
I didn’t come across reports in the United States for how HIV-positive rates vary with religion, but the Rwanda report does include this information:

HIV/AIDS dogma explains rates of testing HIV-positive by sexual and drug-abusing behavior. That provides a dubious basis, to say the least, for understanding how these rates vary with religious affiliation in Rwanda: are we to infer that Muslim women are particularly prone to unsafe promiscuity or drug injecting, while Muslim men are least likely to indulge?

Under the alternative explanation of what HIV-positive means, however—namely, non-specific physiological stress* —, this wouldn’t be at all puzzling if the proportion of Muslim women who are black—of Negroid racial type—is greater than in the other religious groups, since black women are particularly prone to test HIV-positive.
[* see posts of 12 & 25 November 2007, 22 & 29 December, 4, 7, 8 & 12 January 2008]

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It’s often said that scientific theories can be disproved by data that contradict them whereas theories are confirmed when they make successful predictions. Sexually transmitted diseases do not infect middle-aged people more than others in all social groups on disparate continents.
HIV/AIDS theory is disproved because “HIV” is not sexually transmitted.

The theory that HIV-positive reflects a non-specific physiological response was based (in part) on demographic data for the United States, see The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory. The trends published there and taken as universal constitute effectively predictions that the same trends as to age, sex, and population density would be found elsewhere. They have been found in Africa. The theory is thereby confirmed.

HOW TO TEST THEORIES (HIV/AIDS THEORY FLUNKS)

Here’s another puzzler for HIV/AIDS theory:

Why do blacks and Hispanics suffering from “HIV disease” live longer than Asians, Native Americans, or whites suffering from “HIV disease”?
— Among American women, between 2002 and 2004, all deaths from “HIV disease” among Asians, Native Americans, and whites occurred before age 45; but one third of black and Hispanic women with “HIV disease” lived past 45.
— Among American men, between 2002 and 2004, all deaths from “HIV disease” among Asians, Native Americans, and whites occurred before age 55; but more than 10% of black and Hispanic men with “HIV disease” lived past 55.

It’s generally believed that black and Hispanic Americans do not enjoy as high a level of medical care as do white Americans. So why do they stave off this disease better?

Could it be because they are not being treated with “life-saving” or “life-prolonging” antiretroviral drugs?

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A good theory can make predictions that turn out to be accurate, and it can explain new results as they come in.

HIV/AIDS theory fails on both counts.
— The first prediction was made already as the theory was being announced in 1984: a vaccine against the virus would likely be available within two or three years.
Not only is there no vaccine: scores of attempts have all failed, and we have yet to discover what physiological properties of a vaccine would protect against “HIV infection”.
— A second prediction was that AIDS would spread into the general population since its cause was a sexually transmitted agent.
There has been no spread into the general population. There has been no breaking out geographically either—Sub-Saharan Africa remains the only region with an HIV-positive rate ≥5%; the Caribbean remains the only other region with an HIV-positive rate ≥1%.

— New results, far from being explained by HIV/AIDS theory, have brought conundrum after conundrum: the epidemiology of “HIV” is unlike that of any other sexually transmitted agent, indeed of any infectious agent (The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory); married women are a high-risk group (TO AVOID HIV INFECTION, DON’T GET MARRIED, 18 November); more exposure results in less infection (MORE HIV, LESS INFECTION…, 21 November); “infection” rates from this incurable illness have declined dramatically without the inevitably required increase in deaths (NOTEWORTHY SUCCESSES AGAINST AIDS IN AFRICA, 4 December 2007); and more.

By contrast, an alternative theory—I’ll call it the “stress theory”—successfully predicts demographic characteristics of “HIV infection” and has remained able to explain new results as they come in.

The stress theory holds that testing HIV-positive is analogous to running a fever. The Perth Group has written copiously about the evidence that positive HIV-tests signify oxidative stress. My book shows that the epidemiology of “HIV” supports the similar, possibly identical view that testing HIV-positive is a rather non-specific physiological response to some sort of challenge or stress.

This evidence-based stress theory predicts that whenever HIV tests are carried out on some group of people matched for other variables, the rate of testing positive will increase from the teen years into middle age before declining again at higher ages. Below the teens, the rate of testing positive will increase with decreasing age, reaching a high among newborns. Males will always test positive more often than females, except in the lower teen years when the reverse is often observed.

The stress theory further predicts that among any group of people matched for other variables, the rate of testing positive will go in the sequence
Asian ≤ White ≤ Native American ≤ Hispanic ≤ Black

This theory has sufficed to explain every significant new result since the book was published.

Take the variation with age. That females test positive more often than males in the early teen years seems difficult to explain if testing positive means infection by a venereal disease whose chief carriers are gay and bisexual men: one would expect teenaged boys to be at greater risk than girls. On the other hand, this phenomenon fits the notion of physiological stress, since menarche (the onset of menstruation) is more physiologically stressful than what boys experience at puberty. At any rate, that female teens test positive more often than male teens was noted already in the mid-1980s among applicants for military service, in the Job Corps, and in a two-decade survey of military cohorts, all in the United States.

I was recently led to look at data from various African countries in quite another connection, and—lo and behold—came across the statement that in Zambia, “The HIV prevalence among girls 14-19 years old is six times that of boys in the same age group” (Summary Country Profile for HIV/AIDS Treatment Scale-Up, World Health Organization, 2005).

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Earlier, a ludicrously mistaken assertion by Sharon Stone (WORLD AIDS DAY…, 22 December 2007) had caused me to look up data about deaths from “HIV disease” in the United States. The following tables show some of the numbers I found. (The trends were the same for each individual year—2002, 2003, 2004—so I aggregated them to lessen the effect of stochastic (chance, random) variations in the smaller numbers. The reports are available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/nvsr/nvsr.htm.)

For both males and females, the numbers vary with age as predicted by the stress theory, reaching a peak in middle age. The numbers for males are significantly higher than for females—except for that teenage phenomenon of females affected more than males: among the only groups where there were significant numbers of deaths among young teens—African Americans and Hispanics—the numbers for females are greater than those for males in the years 10-14 and 15-19.

And, too, the relative mortality rates vary with race precisely as predicted by the stress theory,
Asian ≤ White ≤ Native American ≤ Hispanic ≤ Black

Further: I mentioned in the book (especially p. 246 ff.) that black women seem particularly prone to test HIV-positive. The black-to-white ratio for “HIV” deaths among women, 24, is more than 3 times that for men, 7.4.

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The very fact that these numbers reflect deaths is in itself consonant with the stress theory. Hospital patients and trauma victims test positive at relatively high rates, higher the more critically ill they are (pp. 84-5 in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory) . Therefore, among people who die from any one of a number of possible causes, one expects a certain proportion to test HIV-positive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribes deaths to “HIV disease” whenever the person was HIV-positive, no matter what the real cause of death was, the manifest cause: cervical cancer, tuberculosis, unexplained weight loss, or just about anything else. So one would expect deaths from “HIV disease” to show the same demographic characteristics as “HIV infection” among living people, and the mortality statistics bear that out.

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It would be interesting to hear from defenders of HIV/AIDS theory their explanation for the age and racial distribution of these deaths on the basis of a supposedly sexually transmitted disease which, untreated, is supposed to bring death within a dozen or so years after infection: How is it that black and Hispanic females manage to survive to age 45-54 before succumbing to this disease whereas Asians, Native Americans, and whites don’t get beyond 44? How is it that black and Hispanic males manage to survive to age 55-64 before succumbing to this disease whereas Asians, Native Americans, and whites don’t get beyond 54?

HIV-POSITIVE CHILDREN, HIV-NEGATIVE MOTHERS

Children not infected by their mothers, and not victims of pedophiles, could become HIV-positive only via infected needles or transfused blood, according to the orthodox view of HIV/AIDS. But a number of reported instances cannot plausibly be explained in this fashion. Instead, they support once again the interpretation of “HIV-positive” as a non-specific marker of physiological stress or challenged health.

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Gisselquist recently cited 42 instances of HIV-positive babies born to HIV-negative mother in South Africa (“Not investigating HIV riddles puts lives at risk”, Business Day (Johannesburg), 4 October 2007). He ascribes these infections to unhygienic medical procedures.

In Britain, 5 of 25 mothers of HIV-positive newborns had tested HIV-negative when entering antenatal care (Struik et al., Arch Dis Child., 12 September 2007 [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 17855439). It was speculated that they must have become infected while they were pregnant.

No explanation was offered about the 4-month-old baby in India who was found to be HIV-positive while neither parent, nor the child’s older sibling, was HIV-positive (www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/004200611260312.htm, accessed 21 December 2007).

Allegations that children became infected with HIV in hospitals or orphanages as a result of unhygienic procedures have also been made in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Romania, and Russia. The Libyan case was widely reported because foreign medical personnel were charged with deliberately infecting children–400 of them in a single hospital (for much detail, see Wikipedia). In Kazakhstan, “at least 78 children have been infected with the HIV virus through the negligence of healthcare workers” (Joanna Lillis, “Government in Kazakhstan Addresses HIV-Infection Scandal” 10/25/06 ); later investigations reported that in 3 hospitals, more than 100 children had become infected in 2006 (cited by Gisselquist, see above). In Kyrgyzstan, “at least 26 people, mostly children, [were] infected in two local hospitals” (Daniel Sershen, “Kyrgyzstan: Officials Grapple with HIV Outbreak”, 10/30/07 ) and medical personnel were fired (“Four more toddlers infected with HIV in outbreak in Kyrgyzstan”, http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hHtqc41vfE3uhmKP2XE2RGAemS2A, accessed 26 October 2007). (For further details regarding Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, see the Archives at www.eurasianet.org.)

Gisselquist (above) describes the following events in Romania and Russia. In Romania, one HIV-positive child of an HIV-negative mother led to further testing, whereupon 12 of 30 children in the same hospital were found to be HIV-positive; widespread testing then found, within a couple of years, 1300 infected–few of them with HIV-positive mothers–among the 12,000 tested. In Russia, it was believed that a single HIV-positive child had led within a couple of years to the infection of 260 children in the same hospital.

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The worldwide consensus over the Libyan affair exonerated the medical personnel from having deliberately infected those 400 children. But how likely is it that these hundreds were all infected accidentally? Could there be so much HIV around in the first place to contaminate the medical instruments? Could the failure to sterilize be really so pervasive? Could conditions have been similarly risky in the hospitals of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Romania, when the prevalence of HIV in those countries is so very low, at ≤0.1% (UNAIDS 2006)? Most of the HIV-positive people in those countries are injecting drug abusers; do hospital personnel perhaps use needles borrowed from drug addicts?

Bear in mind that, no matter what the official propaganda says, the official data make clear that it is extraordinarily difficult to transmit the “HIV-positive” condition via infected needles–see pp. 47-48 of The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory for citations of the peer-reviewed literature reporting, for example, that “HIV-positive” was 34% among injecting drug users (IDU) who did not share needles and only 19% among those who did; an independent study in Montreal found that clean needles were associated with a ten-fold increase in the odds of seroconverting to HIV-positive; there was no spread of HIV among IDU prisoners in Maryland during 2 years; medical personnel have not contracted HIV or AIDS through needle-stick accidents–the risk was estimated at about 0.3% (whereas for hepatitis the risk is > 10%) and only 57 possible instances had been reported by December 2001, when the count of AIDS cases stood near 800,000.

A large unknown is this: For how long can HIV particles remain infectious outside a living body? Long enough for hundreds of children to have been infected within a few short years? That seems extremely unlikely. But if not dirty needles , then what can explain these epidemics of HIV-positive children?

As already suggested, a ready explanation is that “HIV-positive” is the sign of physiological stress having nothing to do with infection by a human immunedeficiency virus. Strong evidence for this comes from the manner in which HIV-positive varies with age (for further details, see Tables 25-27 and associated text in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory). The following schematic diagram, shown also in the post of 18 November,

is based on a large number of individual reports. For ages below the teens, there are four sets of data from public testing sites across the USA (1995-98), one from hospital patients in New Jersey (1988), and one from healthy subjects in Africa (1984-86). Remarkably enough, all showed a similar decrease of the rate of HIV-positives after birth, a decline of about 3/4 in the first year or so. As reflected in the diagram, the rate among newborns was not far from the highest rates recorded at any age, and the lowest rate was in the early teens in all cases.

It seems inconceivable that rates of infection by some contagious agent would show such similar variations with age in such different groups of subjects. On the other hand, this is precisely what one would expect if HIV-positive is a marker of physiological stress. Newborns are immediately challenged to cope with circumstances less friendly than the womb–as noted in an earlier post, Nature has formulated mothers’ milk in a way that helps the infant ward off infections. Over the years, the child’s immune system adapts and the child becomes better able to ward off environmental insults and infections–so, signs of physiological stress become less evident, and the rate of “HIV-positive” declines.

The CDC’s data sets from public testing sites show separately the rates of HIV-positive for females and for males: the latter is greater, by 50% or more. That is again consistent with an explanation in terms of physiological stress, for the natural mortality of male children is higher than that of females. By contrast, it would not be so easy to conjure an explanation of why mothers transmit an infection to male babies 50% more often than to female babies.

Other evidence that HIV-positive marks physiological stress are cited at p. 85 in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, for example: critically ill patients, particularly those in emergency rooms, had higher rates of HIV-positive than others, and unexpectedly high rates of HIV-positive were also found in autopsies.

Once it is accepted that “HIV-positive” is a marker of physiological stress, it becomes rather obvious why it is reported from hospitals in many countries that a significant number of children test HIV-positive even as their parents test negative: the reason is the same as the reason why they are in hospital in the first place, they are experiencing a challenge to health, some degree of physiological stress from any of a variety of possible sources. Surely this is a more plausible line of reasoning than one that has to envisage HIV-infected instruments in large-scale use in several countries, even those where the rate of HIV-positive in the general population is as low as 0.1%; or reasoning that has to envisage that, in Britain, 20% of HIV-positive newborns have that infection because their mothers practiced unsafe sex or drug-injecting even while they were pregnant.

These data about HIV-positive children of HIV-free parents confirms what one can learn from studies of HIV and breast-feeding and from the reports that married women in many places are at the greatest risk for becoming HIV-positive: “HIV-positive” does not signal infection by a deadly virus.

Data about AIDS as well as HIV-positives among children also throws direct doubt on the orthodox view that “HIV-positive” presages progression to AIDS. According to the CDC’s 2005 Surveillance Report, for every 137 adults “living with HIV” in 2005, there were 174.5 “living with AIDS”; among children below 13 years of age, for every 7.4 “living with HIV” there were 2.7 “living with AIDS”. That seems to indicate that the chances of a child progressing from HIV to AIDS is much less than the chance of an adult doing so: for every HIV-positive child, there is only one in three (2.7/7.4 = 0.36) with AIDS, whereas for every HIV-positive adult, there is more than one with AIDS, 137/174.5 = 1.27. Is it conceivable, does it make sense, that children could be 3½ times (1.27/0.36) better able to resist progression to disease than adults?