CDC MONGERS FEAR AND HAWKS DEADLY VACCINE

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
— have confused correlation with causation, thus committing perhaps the most elementary error against which students of statistics are warned (p. 194 in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory);
— invented an “hierarchical” classification scheme that set HIV/AIDS on a wrong course and made multivariate analysis impossible (ibid, p. 19);
— disseminated propaganda that everyone was at risk for AIDS while knowing that “for most heterosexuals, the risk from a single act of sex was smaller than the risk of ever getting hit by lightning” (Bennett and Sharpe, Wall Street Journal, 1 May, pp. A1, 6);
— use incompetent computer models (ibid, p. 223) and disseminate their flawed estimates rather than actual counts (pp. 221-2);
— reduced retroactively some actually reported numbers, thereby obfuscating a decline in “AIDS” deaths (ibid, p. 221);
— had the gall to say in 2005 that “HIV infections” in the United States had surpassed a million “for the first time” when they had been estimating about a million for the past two decades (ibid, pp. 1-2);
— increasingly commingle “HIV” and “AIDS” data so that the lack of correlation between them is obscured;
— and for reasons not difficult to infer, they have invented “HIV disease” (post of Friday, 28 December 2007).

Given all that (and more), I hardly imagined that I would ever be taken aback at anything said or done by the CDC. Still they managed to surprise me with the 11 March announcement that

“1 in 4 Teenage Girls Has a Sexually Transmitted Disease
– 3.2 Million Female Adolescents Estimated to Have at Least One of the Most Common STDs” (CDC Press Release, 2008 National STD Prevention Conference—Confronting Challenges, Applying Solutions)

1 of every 4 teenage females just seems awfully high. But how can one argue with scientific facts?

“Chicago [March 11, 2008] – A CDC study released today estimates that one in four (26 percent) young women between the ages of 14 and 19 in the United States – or 3.2 million teenage girls – is infected with at least one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus, and trichomoniasis).… The two most common STDs overall were human papillomavirus, or HPV (18 percent), and chlamydia (4 percent). …CDC also recommends that girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 who have not been vaccinated or who have not completed the full series of shots be fully vaccinated against HPV.”

The study was based on data from a survey done in 2003-4. Why did it take more than 3 years to release information of this importance? Perhaps there was no point in frightening people before an HPV vaccine was available?

“ ‘The statistics are certainly disheartening,’ said Dr. Dorothy Furgerson, medical director at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte” (Julie Sevrens Lyons, Mercury News).

Indeed. But disheartening perhaps for other reasons than Dr. Furgerson had in mind:
“The new study by CDC researcher Dr. Sara Forhan is an analysis of nationally representative records on girls and women ages 14 to 19 who participated in a 2003-04 government health survey. . . . [of] 838 teens”

One might wonder whether 838 could be truly representative nationally. But the main point here has to do with human papillomavirus and the touting of “full” vaccination against it. Here are some other facts from the CDC itself:

“Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and another 6.2 million people become newly infected each year. At least 50% of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives
….
The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2008, 11,070 women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer in the U.S. . . . [and with other] HPV-related cancers . . .
3,460 women diagnosed with vulvar cancer;
2,210 women diagnosed with vaginal and other female genital cancers;
1,250 men diagnosed with penile and other male genital cancers; and
3,050 women and 2,020 men diagnosed with anal cancer.”

In other words, with 6.2 million newly infected with HPV annually, about 20,000 women annually will be diagnosed with a cancer “related” to HPV.

Keep in mind that it has never been proven that HPV causes the cancer; all the CDC has, once again, is a correlation.

Evidently the chance of contracting one of these “HPV-related” cancers if one is infected with HPV is 20,000 out of 6.2 million, about 1 in 300 or 3.3 per 1000. Can something that is “associated” with a cancer only three times in a thousand really be said to cause that cancer?

Even were that so, consider the relative risks of vaccination and of not vaccinating. Leave aside that the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, costs $120 for each of three required shots. Consider only that it was approved in June 2006 by the Food and Drug Administration, and that within less than a year there had come numerous reports of dangerous “side”-effects:

“Judicial Watch Uncovers Three Deaths Relating To HPV Vaccine” (24 May 2007)

“Judicial Watch . . . today released documents obtained from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, detailing 1,637 reports of adverse reactions to the vaccination for human papillomavirus (HPV), Gardasil. Three deaths were related to the vaccine. . . . As of May 11, 2007, the 1,637 adverse vaccination reactions reported to the FDA . . . included 371 serious reactions. Of the 42 women who received the vaccine while pregnant, 18 experienced side effects ranging from spontaneous abortion to fetal abnormities. Side effects published by Merck & Co. warn the public about potential pain, fever, nausea, dizziness and itching after receiving the vaccine. Indeed, 77% of the adverse reactions reported are typical side effects to vaccinations. But other more serious side effects reported include paralysis, Bells Palsy, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and seizures. ‘The FDA adverse event reports on the HPV vaccine read like a catalog of horrors,’ stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ‘Any state or local government now beset by Merck’s lobbying campaigns to mandate this HPV vaccine for young girls ought to take a look at these adverse health reports. It looks as if an unproven vaccine with dangerous side effects is being pushed as a miracle drug.’”

Yet the CDC is urging this dangerous vaccine on all females aged between 11 and 26… Evidently, press releases from the CDC ought to carry a “black box warning”:

Not that it’s necessarily better elsewhere:

“Glaxo wins European Union approval to sell Cervarix” (byline Marthe Fourcade)
“Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) — GlaxoSmithKline Plc won European Union approval for its cervical cancer vaccine Cervarix, allowing the company to compete with Merck & Co.’s Gardasil in the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical market. The vaccine was cleared for sale in 27 countries . . . .”

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Sometimes toxic things (think antiretroviral drugs) have temporarily beneficial side-effects (the general phenomenon is known as “hormesis”). In this case, the toxic press-release from the CDC has the side-benefit of allowing me to recommend the book “Virus Mania” by Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Köhnlein (www.trafford.com/06-3226 or orders@ trafford.com; 320 pp, softcover, US$24.00, C$27.60, EUR18.71, £12.40).

I had been in a quandary, what to write about this book, which I’d just been reading. It contains some important eye-opening material; but the translation from German leaves quite a bit to be desired, and the tone is strident at times in indicting institutions and companies for deliberate deception and putting profits ahead of everything else. But any such defects are dwarfed by those in CDC publications. Readers should of course reach their own opinion by checking the sources cited in “Virus Mania”—just as they should always check in CDC publications for inconsistency of data, for estimates masquerading as facts, and so on. But all quibbles aside,“Virus Mania” reveals palpable facts that bring into serious question the widespread official propaganda about hepatitis C, mad-cow disease, SARS, avian flu, and cervical cancer, as well as more generally about vaccination and virology—not to mention AIDS, of course.

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.

**************

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”).

ANOTHER STRIKING SUCCESS AGAINST HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA

I noted some time ago (NOTEWORTHY SUCCESSES AGAINST AIDS IN AFRICA, 4 December 2007) that several African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe) were able to decrease the prevalence of HIV more than could be accounted for by deaths. That’s just another of the many mysteries posed by HIV/AIDS theory. Infection by HIV is said to be permanent. Therefore, if the overall rate of infection in a country decreases, that can only be through removal of infected individuals through death or emigration—removal of a larger number than the number of new infections.

(An alternative explanation, of course, is that “HIV-positive” is neither permanent nor a sign of infection by a virus. But that simple explanation is beyond the pale.)

Rwanda offers another such nail in the coffin of HIV/AIDS theory:

“Rwanda in mass circumcision drive” (BBC, 22 January 2008 )
”Figures from the World Bank last year put the prevalence of Aids in the country at about 3%, down from 11% in 2000.”

So at least 8% of the population must have died from HIV/AIDS during seven or eight years, say 1% per year. (“At least” because it assumes no new infections during that time.) The total population is a little less than 10,000,000. Therefore about 100,000 a year must have died from HIV/AIDS.

The CIA Fact Book gives the overall death rate in Rwanda as about 15 per 1000. For the population of 10 million, this is 150,000 per year. If there were 100,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS, then deaths from all other causes would have been only 50,000, or 5 per 1000 for the population as a whole. Such a “natural” death rate of 5 per 1000, however, is impossibly lower than that in the countries enjoying the longest lifespan: overall death rates are 10.3 per 1000 in Sweden, about 9 in Japan, 8.3 in the USA, 7.9 in Canada, 7.6 in Australia.

But perhaps 100,000 didn’t die each year from HIV disease; after all, the CIA Fact Book also gives the number of HIV/AIDS deaths for 2003 as 22,000.

Perhaps 78,000 HIV-positive Rwandans (100,000 minus 22,000) became spontaneously HIV-negative each year?
No, we’re told that’s impossible (even though there are plenty of reports of spontaneous seroreversion, see for instance HIV “INFECTION” DISAPPEARS SPONTANEOUSLY, 22 January 200

Perhaps the HIV-positive rates reported by the World Bank were wrong by something like a factor of about 5?
Well, if so, then the policies regarding HIV/AIDS that have been followed by the World Bank and other such prestigious organizations are based on entirely wrong numbers.

Perhaps HIV/AIDS numbers issued by official bodies shouldn’t be taken too seriously?
Indeed they should not; see Russian statistics in HIV NONSENSE: TODAY AND EVERY DAY, 22 November 2007; HIV DOUBLETHINK, 27 November 2007; HIV/AIDS: NUMBERS THAT DON’T ADD UP, 29 November; WORLD AIDS DAY . . ., 22 December 2007.

Perhaps numbers from the CIA Fact Book should not be taken seriously? After all, it reports that the Rwandan population grew at an estimated rate of 2.766% (not, in other words [or numbers] a rate of 2.767%, or of 2.765%).
How could an estimate be so accurate?
Once again, apparently the output of a computer program was copied, published, and disseminated without the benefit of intervening thought. CIA statisticians need to be included among those federal officials who deserve a short course in the use of significant figures in mathematics (MATHEMATICAL AND STATISTICAL LIES ABOUT HIV/AIDS, 2 December 2007).

TUBERCULOSIS AGAIN

Further to IS TUBERCULOSIS AN APHRODISIAC? (4 January 2008):

“Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS: Twin Harbingers of Death”, 22 January 2008
“Health experts assert that effectively treating tuberculosis will not solve the worldwide HIV/AIDS crisis, but it will significantly reduce its burden. This is the strategy of a local body as it battles these twin agents of death through its health centres scattered throughout Nigeria. Godwin Haruna writes . . .
Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS epidemics fuel one another and health experts say they are inextricably linked. According to Dr. Nanshep Daniel Gobgab, director of primary health care system and programmes of the Christian Health Association of Nigeria (CHAN), the weakened immune system of an individual living with HIV increases the likelihood of developing tuberculosis. Gobgab adds that the development of active TB accelerates the progression of HIV disease towards full-blown AIDS.”

It would be uncharitable, of course, to ask for an explanation of the mechanism by which active TB accelerates the progression of HIV disease, if for no other reason than that the mechanism by which HIV causes disease is itself an enduring mystery. Montagnier’s lab showed that, in vitro, CD4 cells are not killed by HIV in the presence of antibiotic, which marks the killer as a microbe and not a virus (Lemaître et al. Research in Virology 141 [1990] 5-16; Infection and Immunity 60 [1992] 742–8). The mainstream has long abandoned the view that HIV kills immune-system cells directly, and a number of suggestions have been made, none of them substantiated to the level of general acceptance: antigenic diversity; super antigen; T-cell anergy; apoptosis; Th1-Th2 switch (Chapter 7, Principles of Molecular Virology).

“ ‘Most TB cases in people with HIV are from reactivation of old infections. However, since tuberculosis is spread by casual contact, people with HIV/AIDS can also contract new or primary TB infection. These new infections can progress rapidly to active disease, rather than follow the typical course of years of dormancy’”

Since “people with HIV/AIDS” means “HIV-positive”, in other words, already exposed to a health challenge of some sort, of course they will be more prone to succumb to some additional health challenge

“TB is the leading killer of people with AIDS. In fact, tuberculosis is the first manifestation of AIDS in over 50 percent of cases in the developing world. According to her, people who are infected with TB and are HIV positive are 3 to 10 times more likely to develop TB than people without HIV infection.”

Exactly. Those TB patients who are HIV-positive are the ones who are more seriously ill. Note that “AIDS” was discovered because people were coming down with opportunistic infections—fungal pneumonia, yeast infections—not with common diseases like TB. AIDS nowadays is an entirely different thing than 1980s AIDS.

“ . . . one-third of HIV-infected people worldwide are co-infected with TB, and TB is responsible for the death of one out of every three people with HIV/AIDS worldwide.”

Exactly. One-third of HIV-positive people are HIV-positive only because they have TB.

“Escalating tuberculosis rates over the past 10 years in many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia are largely attributable to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”

The so-called AIDS epidemic in Africa and Asia is largely a TB epidemic.

“Much of TB’s resurgence is directly connected to the explosive spread of HIV, especially in Africa, where two-thirds of HIV patients carry tuberculosis.”

But there hasn’t been an explosive spread of HIV. Its prevalence has remained the same in every region for which UNAIDS and CDC have been giving estimates; see for example Preface, Figure 26, and Tables 20 & 31 in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland 2007).

Activists don’t hesitate to use the supposed connection between TB and HIV/AIDS to their own advantage, of course:

“Campaigners against TB and AIDS Urged to Co-operate”, by Miriam Mannak (10 November 2007)
“Tuberculosis (TB) in Africa cannot be dealt with while TB and HIV/AIDS organisations refuse to set aside their differences, health experts said Friday during the 38th Union World Conference on Lung Health. ‘So far, many TB and HIV programmes in Africa—or anywhere in the world—do not co-operate with one another, despite the strong connection that exists between HIV and TB’ . . . . ‘In some African countries for instance, 75 percent to 80 percent of the people living with TB are co-infected with HIV’”

Again: TB is one of the conditions that can cause a positive HIV-test

“HIV has always been the big kid on the block, with TB being the little brother. HIV programmes and organisations seem to be afraid that TB takes away attention and funding.”

Of course; that’s what it’s all about, who gets the money.

“ ‘In 2005, only seven percent of HIV patients worldwide were tested for TB,’ said Alasdair Reid, HIV/TB advisor to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. ‘That is shocking. By testing people living with HIV for TB we can save thousands and thousands of lives each year. And, it is feasible. The problem is the lack of co-operation between the different organisations that deal with TB or HIV.’ new model for distribution of funds is also required, Reid added. “Currently, money is raised for either HIV or TB, and funds dedicated for HIV can’t be used for TB or vice versa.’”

Exactly; it’s all about who gets the money. And these officials don’t hesitate to talk utter rubbish:

“When you want to tackle HIV you need to tackle TB, especially in Africa where so many people are co-infected.”

TRIMMING FACTS, INVENTING EPIDEMICS

HIV is perpetually in danger of spreading; it’s always just about to spread into areas and groups where it hasn’t been before. That’s the constant refrain in news reports and official press releases, though the facts are that it hasn’t done so in 25 years and there’s no reason to suspect that things have changed. But facts don’t change dogmatic beliefs, and if the facts are too troublesome then it might be time to stop collecting them:

“there are less reported cases of infection in Texas border counties than in the rest of the state. This statistic does not conform to what is known about how the virus is commonly transmitted, potentially indicating an under-tested population. ‘We almost discontinued the border report because the data is potentially inaccurate,’ said Cynthia Taylor, an epidemiologist with the TDSHS [Texas Department of State Health Services].
‘RIPE TO EXPLODE’
Recent analysis of border communities from McAllen to El Paso by Farmworker Justice reveals that border residents are engaged in risky sexual behaviors, including sex without condoms, sex with multiple partners, or with sex workers.
‘Given the prevalence of those kinds of behaviors, we may be at the cusp of an epidemic,’ said Shelly Davis, deputy director of the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit. ‘Maybe the statistics are inaccurate, or maybe HIV hasn’t entered this population yet, but if it does, conditions are ripe for it to explode’” [all emphases added]
HIV on the Border, by Laura Tillman, The Brownsville Herald (Texas), 5 January 2008

* * * * * *

Just so:
— Since it’s “known” that HIV is sexually transmitted, all data showing the opposite must be ignored.
— If necessary, stop gathering data wherever they don’t support the theory.
— If there’s no epidemic, then we must be on the cusp of one.
— Ignore the point that in order to argue in this fashion, one must make the extraordinarily implausible assumption that the contemporary risky sexual behavior must be something new, since it hasn’t yet brought the epidemic beyond its cusp.
— Never stop to ask, why the facts contradict the theory.

For further illustrations, see “Inventing new epidemics”, p. 114 ff. in The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.