the AIDS thing

From: Susan Brassfield (Susan-Brassfield@ou.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 15:22:59 EDT

  • Next message: Stephen E. Jones: "Re: the AIDS thing"

    >http://library.newsday.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=38e3d07b627cbMshakeP11000&doc
    >=hdresults.html ...
    >... Duesberg insists that AIDS
    >in the African context is "nothing more than a new name for old diseases,"
    >... Tom Bethell ..., "People are not dying of AIDS but of the diseases that
    >have always afflicted those parts of the globe where water is not clean
    >and sewage is not properly disposed of"... Gayle, who heads up AIDS
    >programs for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ...
    >denounced the skeptics and said that "there is no merit in questioning
    >conventional wisdom" about HIV.... [The reactions of the pro-drug
    >establishment: " criminal prosecution", "genocide", "Holocaust did not
    >occur" and "no merit in questioning conventional wisdom" is disturbingly
    >unscientific. They sound just like people with something to hide. if they
    >were confident of their case they should *welcome* the chance to finally
    >prove the AIDS skeptics like Duesberg wrong. BTW if this "Banqui
    >Definition" of AIDS is not the same as the definition used in Western
    >countries, then the African statistics might be inflated with non-HIV/AIDS
    >cases.]

    Stephen Jones quoted a huge amount of the above article but left out these
    two tidbits:

    "Last June, following Mbeki's election to the presidency, Manto
    Tshabalala-Msimang was named minister of health. UNAIDS then brokered a
    deal with British pharmaceutical company Glaxo Wellcome for cut-rate AZT
    to be used in Africa to reduce the spread of HIV from infected mothers to
    their babies. Such AZT interventions reduced the number of HIV-positive
    babies born in the
     United States to just 32 last year."

    and

    " (Ironically, when Deputy President Zuma's wife was raped in South Africa
     last summer she was immediately put on Nevirapine in hopes of blocking HIV
     transmission.)"

    Is it more anti-intellectual clap-trap? or is it pure racism or homophobia?
    I still havn't figured it out.

    Susan

    ----------

    For if there is a sin against life, it consists not so much in despairing
    of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of
    this one.
    --Albert Camus

    http://www.telepath.com/susanb/



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