African AIDS -- A myth!?

bifrost99 · � #1 � 05-24-2007, 11:26 AM

Is it just a conspiracy theory or what?

I'm just reading the book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," by Tom Bethell. One of its chapters deals with AIDS in Africa. Apparently, the "many" AIDS cases in Africa are never diagnosed confirmatively. The diagnostic method was "created" using a point system of clinical symptoms, all of which could be any disease. (Search "Bangui1985Report" and you can download the PDF file of this system. One is from the WHO itself: click here to download).

From what I could gather in that chapter, after a 1981 report by a Dr. Lawrence K Altman entitled "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals" (the real AIDS!), efforts were made to divert the disease away from male homosexuality.

And creating an "African pandemic" served this purpose well. It also provided the convenient "claim" that AIDS is a heterosexual disease as well. At least that's how I interpret the data in the chapter (the author did not specifically claim that).

Ann Coulter also points out the avoidance of showing AIDS as a male homosexual malady, showing that in spite of predictions, it hasn't spread sexually among purely heterosexual people. (In here book, "Godless.")

How is AIDS diagnosed in Africa? From the Bangui report as quoted from Bethell's book:

Quote:

Clinical Diagnosis of AIDS in Africa

Exclusion criteria
1. Pronounced malnutrition
2. Cancer
3. Immunosuppressive treatment

Inclusion criteria with the corresponding scores

Important signs / Score

Weight loss exceeding 10% of body weight / 4
Protracted asthenia / 4

Very frequent signs
Continuous or repeated attacks of fever for more than a month / 3
Diarrhoea lasting for more than a month / 3

Other signs
Cough / 2
Pneumopathy / 2
Oropharyngeal candidiasis / 4
Chronic or relapsing cutaneous herpes / 4
Generalized pruritic dermatosis / 4
Herpes zoster (relapsing) / 4
Generalized adenopathy / 2
Neurological signs / 2
Generalized Kaposi's sarcoma / 12

THE DIAGNOSIS OF AIDS IS ESTABLISHED WHEN THE SCORE IS 12 OR MORE.

Source:"Workshop on Aids in Central Africa," Bangui, Central African Republic, 22 to 25 October 1985, World Health Organization, 15.

Is this still the same criteria for diagnosing AIDS in Africa?

With test kits now readily available to detect HIV (which do not even confirm AIDS), I wonder if all these African "victims" will come out positive.

Gerry

bifrost99 · � #2 � 05-24-2007, 11:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bifrost99

With test kits now readily available to detect HIV (which do not even confirm AIDS), I wonder if all these African "victims" will come out positive.

Oops

I sent my post too soon, not even having finished the chapter. I still haven't finished the chapter, but check this:

Quote:

False positive

The Bangui definition made it easy for health bureaucrats to diagnose AIDS easily, evidently with the hope that millions of cases would soon be reported to the WHO. But this did not happen. The WHO's Weekly Epidemiological Record reported at the end of 1999, for example, that for the whole of Africa a cumulative total of 794,000 cases of AIDS cases had been reported. In November 2000, the same WHO publication reported a cumulative total of onlyl 12,825 AIDS cases in South Africa since 1982.

These numbers were still not earth-shaking, especially when broken down by country... Soon, however, the figures were enormously augmented. HIV tests were conducted at prenatal clinics in various African countries, but primarily in South Africa. The numbers found to be "HIV positive" in these tests were then extrapolated to the whole country and then added to the "clinic surveillance" cases. By this stratagem, it was found that the number of South Africans "living with HIV" in 2000 (to choose just one year) had grown to 4.2 million.

The underlying problem here, rarely reported, is that HIV tests react to lots of conditions in addition to HIV. The antibody tests react to certain proteins that are not specific to HIV antibodies. Parasites that cause malaria, in particular, confound the test. Rian Malan reported a test published in a scientific journal in which a special preparation that absorbed the malaria antibodies was added. At that point, 80 percent of the suspected HIV infections vanished, he reported.

...In South Africa's pregnancy clinic surveys, a single ELISA (Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay) test is deemed sufficient confirmation. Yet Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer of the test, has warned that pregnancy itself is among the conditions that can yield a misleading result.

The Western Blot test, often used to "confirm" HIV infection, also reacts to other conditions. Flu, herpes, immunizations, hepatitis, blood transfusions, parasites, tuberculosis, and malaria are among the dozens of conditions that can give rise to false positives...

Yet the main surveillance study for HIV prevalence in South Africa depends on a single ELISA test administered to pregnant Africans, never acknowledging that pregnancy is "one of seventy conditions known to trigger a 'false positive' result."

Conditions that define AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are caused by many germs, not just HIV. And the other diseases caused by these germs also produce a "positive" result in the HIV test. Charles Gilks wrote in the British Medical Journal that persistent diarrhea with weight loss can be associated with "ordinary enteric parasites and bacteria," as well as with opportunistic infection. "In countries where the incidence of tuberculosis is high," he added (and it is high in Africa) "substantial numbers of people reported as havnig AIDS may in fact not have AIDS." He concluded that the Bangui definition "is inherently unworkable and incorrect."

From Bethell, Tom. The Politically Incorrect guide to Science. Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005, pages 113-115.

Gerry

Mad Scientest · � #3 � 05-27-2007, 07:55 PM

I seem to recall reading something along this same line a while back. It was claimed that if a person had any of the symptoms for AIDs then that person was automatically counted as being infected. It did not matter if that symptom could also be an indication of some other disease. What was required was the presumption that that there was a vast epidemic under way so that vast amounts of money would start flowing. :x

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