Even Marie Clair is reporting this!

Jumping Ship:
Head of UN’s AIDS program Piot to step down
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10391233.htm

Was it ever really really??

What a total (De)Cock up!

Hets can now do it to their hearts content again as the AIDS voodoo has been officially lifted.

Kevin De Cock of the WHOrg. says:

Now AIDS is officially a “disease” that affects only fags, blacks, junkies, poor people, whores and their clients, and that the greater threat of a generalised heterosexual pandemic was a “fantasy” they inflicted on the world.

He does not say why though…Amazing no?

Moneyline.com:

Mbeki was right : Inconvenient Truth?

President Thabo Mbeki and the Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang might just have opened a can of worms with their HIV controversy. Nobody likes a bright spark one could argue and nothing is ever closed to an open mind. It was after all Nicolas Copernicus who argued against the established scientific community or rather the church that the earth revolved around the sun. Anyone arguing against the views of the church such as Galileo were hauled before the Inquisition and made to renounce their statements. Could we argue that very little has changed over the past 400 years when it comes to human nature and that the scientific community has now been replaced by the church?

Neither party have ever given us their understanding of HIV/AIDS so we are unable to make an informed decision, yet without any explanation or information we belittle and chastise them for thinking different. What would be the definition of scientific proof which we hold so dear, when so many prominent scientists may argue for and against the very hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS? Today we may laugh at the very fact that 400 years ago we thought the earth was flat, or that the earth was the center of the universe. Yet, today we agree unanimously and with absolute scientific proof that the earth is not flat. Can we say the same about our hypothesis about HIV and AIDS?

Could we argue that Thabo Mbeki had discovered the study of HIV infection rates conducted by the University of California with was concluded in 1997 and could not do the math either?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9270414?dopt=Abstract

That study after all that was the largest and longest study of Transmission Rates of HIV in couples in the US. They took 82 HIV positive females and their husbands let’s call them Group A. They also took 360 HIV positive men and their wives, let’s call them Group B and monitored both groups over a period of 10 years.

What happened after 10 years was that only 20% of woman in Group B tested positive for HIV and a mere 2.4% of males in Group A tested positive. Yes we can therefore conclude that the supposable male to female transmission rates are higher than female to male. We can also suppose that condoms stopped all HIV transmissions.

The more important question however is why after 10 years of exposure has so few been infected considering the global rates of HIV/AIDS. The math does not add up and it must be a statistical anomaly alternatively the hypothesis that HIV alone causes AIDS is flawed. We could even be so bold as to argue that HIV itself is a myth.

Should we in times of turmoil reject all possibilities when we are not certain if we are correct? Would it not be in the interest of better science to always keep an open mind? The question does remain. Will history treat Thabo Mbeki as the Copernicus of HIV/AIDS or as a president who was ill informed?

http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/moneyonline/2008/05/31/mbeki-was-right-inconvenient-truth/

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/8/52

“Malnutrition was another strong, independent predictor of mortality in our study. Estimated one year mortality was nearly 50% among patients with severe malnutrition. Previously, studies from industrialized countries have shown that malnutrition in HIV infection is associated with morbidity and mortality, even after the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the late 1990s [30-32].

More recently, studies from developing countries have found that malnutrition is an independent predictor of mortality in patients starting ART [8,12,13,33]. However, it is not clear whether targeted therapy for malnutrition will result in improved survival [34]. Studies of nutritional interventions in HIV patients are urgently needed in developing countries, where malnutrition is often a result of poverty and food insecurity.”

Feeding starving Africans doesn’t result in improved survival??? Nearly half the patients in this study were severely malnourished (BMI
<16kg/m2), only 15% had normal BMI.

The mortality across all patients was astonishingly high at nearly 30% during a median 10 months follow-up, and two-thirds of them died within three months of starting ARVs. The authors rationalise this by saying these Africans had “more severe disease”.

In other words, all these Africans caught “HIV disease” a long, long time ago, then hung around for years waiting for the great white doctors with their
“life-saving” drugs, and then had the ingratitude to drop dead in an eerily co-ordinated manner within 3 months of taking said drugs.

The adjusted mortality HRs were:

WHO stage (IV vs I-III) = 1.46. Anaemia vs no anaemia (Hb > 12 g/dl): Hb < 8 - 9.2. Hb 8-9.9 = 7.5. Hb 10-11.9 = 4.03. BMI (vs > 18.5 kg/m2); <16 = 2.12. 16-18 = 1.27.

If they died due to more advanced disease surely the HR for WHO stage would reflect this? Drug toxicity was mentioned in the discussion of the first draft, but this was strangely absent in the final draft. The drugs were stavudine + other ARVs or AZT + other ARVs. Gee, do you suppose feeding bone-marrow destroying drugs (aka the very dead elephant in the living room) to people with anaemia might be a bad idea?

Health expert calls for end to UN HIV programme
Friday, 09 May 2008 08:17
http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/austria/countries/switzerland/health-expert-calls-end-un-hiv-programme-$1222028.htm

The joint United Nations programme on HIV and Aids should be “closed down rapidly”, according to a health management expert.

Roger England, chairman of Health Systems Workshop - an independent advisory group on health management in poor countries - says UNAids should be disbanded as its mandate is “wrong and harmful”.

Launched in 1996, UNAids is based in Switzerland and works in more than 80 countries worldwide against the spread of HIV and Aids.

Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Mr England says the agency was set up on the argument that HIV and its impact are exceptional.

But he writes that this argument is no longer valid and says the claims HIV needs its own body as it can tip households into poverty would also apply to all serious diseases and disasters.

“HIV is a major disease in southern Africa, but it is not a global catastrophe, and language from a top UNAids official that describes it as ‘one of the make-or-break forces of this century’ and a ‘potential threat to the survival and well-being of people worldwide’ is sensationalist,” Mr England said.

“Worldwide the number of deaths from HIV each year is about the same as that among children aged under five years in India.”

He argues that “far too much is spent on HIV relative to other needs and that this is damaging health systems”.

His estimates claim HIV causes 3.7 per cent of mortality but receives a quarter of international healthcare aid and a “big chunk” of domestic expenditure.

“HIV exceptionalism is dead - and the writing is on the wall for UNAIDS,” Mr England said.

“Why a UN agency for HIV and not for pneumonia or diabetes, which both kill more people?”

He added: “UNAids should be closed down rapidly, not because it has performed badly given its mandate, which it has not, but because its mandate is wrong and harmful.

“Its technical functions should be refitted into [the World Health Organisation], to be balanced with those for other diseases.”

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/print/156965.htm

Myths behind AIDS might lead to billions in misspending

Sunday, May 18, 2008
By James Chin, Special to The China Post

GENEVA — As health ministers gather for the World Health Assembly here this week, there is one organization that can justifiably feel smug. UNAIDS — the U.N.’s specialist AIDS advocacy body — has raised some US$110 billion for the next five years: thanks to its efforts, AIDS will shortly become the biggest single item in foreign aid.

Raising money is the easy part. Spending it effectively is harder.

Good managers know that good policy cannot exist without accurate data but UNAIDS has systematically exaggerated the size and trend of the pandemic, in addition to hyping the potential for HIV epidemics in “general” populations. While this distortion of HIV epidemiology has been useful for raising money, it has resulted in billions of dollars of unnecessary and misdirected spending.

Part of UNAIDS’s fundraising success has been its ability to convince donors that the pandemic is getting worse and is also a potential threat to all people everywhere. But UNAIDS’s claims are not supported by the epidemiologic data.

This data tells us that those at greatest risk of HIV infection are: heterosexuals and gay men who have unprotected sex with concurrent and multiple partners, within open or overlapping sex networks; regular sex partners of HIV infected persons; and people exposed to HIV infected blood, such as injecting drug users.

In framing the global response to AIDS, UNAIDS has ignored this and promoted a range of myths that have more to do with political correctness than science.

For instance, UNAIDS claims that poverty and discrimination are major determinants of high HIV prevalence. In 1987, John Mann, the first head of AIDS at the World Health Organization, claimed that being “excluded from the mainstream of society or being discriminated on grounds of race, religion or sexual preference, led to an increase of HIV infection,” a litany uncritically accepted by UNAIDS.

All available data suggests the opposite. In Africa, AIDS is a disease associated with wealth. The richest people in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia have HIV rates several times higher than the poorest, probably because wealthy men and women in these countries have more sex partners.

Poverty and discrimination present barriers to gaining access to prevention and treatment but are not primary determinants of sexual behavior — the real determinant of sexual HIV transmission. The U.S. response to global AIDS — US$50 billion over the next five years (held up in the Senate but likely to pass) — is based on the poverty principle. This mistake could lead to all kinds of mis-spending down the line.

In a similar vein, UNAIDS has consistently claimed that the world is on the brink of generalized heterosexual HIV epidemics. In 1997, UNAIDS chief Peter Piot gloomily foretold that “AIDS will cut through Asian populations like a hot knife through cold butter.” Aside from a few explosive heterosexual epidemics within large commercial sex networks in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and several states in India in the late 1980s to early 1990s, Dr. Piot’s dire and colorful prediction never occurred.A recent report by an independent commission on AIDS in Asia has acknowledged that epidemic sexual HIV transmission has not spread in Asia beyond the highest HIV-risk groups, such as gay men, injecting drug users, and sex workers, into any general population. However, UNAIDS’s perpetuation of the myth that everyone is at risk of AIDS has led to billions wasted on HIV prevention programs directed at general populations and especially youth, who, outside of sub-Saharan Africa, are at minimal risk of any exposure to HIV.

UNAIDS’s proposed budget for 2008 includes US$1.9 billion for prevention programs aimed at young people and the workplace. While some of this will be usefully spent in sub-Saharan Africa, the rest is effectively wasted.

At least US$5 billion has been wasted in this way in the last five years. Meanwhile, to the shame of the global health bureaucracy, a handful of diseases that are relatively inexpensive to prevent or treat — several vaccine-preventable diseases, diarrheal diseases, malaria and some acute respiratory infections — continue to account for about four million annual child deaths globally.

UNAIDS is apparently concerned that support for AIDS programs might be reduced if most regional HIV rates are stable or decreasing and HIV remains concentrated in the highest-risk populations.

These are realistic concerns but global and regional HIV rates have remained stable or have been decreasing during the past decade; HIV continues to be concentrated in populations with the highest levels of HIV risk behaviors; and HIV is incapable of epidemic spread in the vast majority of heterosexual populations.

Continued denial of these realities will further erode whatever credibility UNAIDS and other mainstream AIDS agencies and experts may still have, and will seriously damage the future fight against this disease: let’s face the data and put the money where the real problems really are.

James Chin, a former chief of the surveillance, forecasting, and impact assessment unit of the Global Program on AIDS of the World Health Organization, is clinical professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley. His monograph The Myth Of A “General” AIDS Pandemic is published by the Campaign for Fighting Diseases this month. He is in Geneva to meet policymakers at the WHA.

Noble untruths about HIV/Aids

By Christopher Caldwell, FT.com site
Published: Nov 23, 2007

There was good news and bad news in the annual report published on Tuesday by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) and the World Health Organisation. The good news was that there are a lot fewer people infected with HIV than we had thought - about 7m fewer, in fact. A small fraction of that decline was due to safer behaviour and better drugs, but most of it came from fixing flawed statistics. Hence the bad news: a quarter-century into an epidemic that has killed millions, the organisation that leads the fight admits that it has been doing so with shaky data. Certain doctors have been saying this for a long time and the UN has ignored them. This week’s correction was a reminder that, while the UN can sidestep local political squabbles, questions of accountability inevitably crop up again at the international level, with the stakes often much higher.

Last year’s UNAids report showed 39.5m people infected with HIV. That figure has been adjusted to 32.7m. The old methods relied too heavily on “sentinel-site surveillance” - on extrapolating from data gathered at prenatal clinics. It was assumed that the rate of HIV in the population at large would closely track the rate among pregnant women in urban clinics. That turned out to be a mistake. This year the UN paid more attention to national surveys and blood-testing. Basic assumptions have been changed. India’s rate of infection has been cut in half. The new, more empirical count, is 33.2m cases worldwide. Aids is spreading more slowly than assumed and global HIV incidence appears to have peaked around 1998, according to the UN’s graphs.

There is no occasion for complacency. Aids is still the leading cause of death in Africa and the fourth-leading cause of death in the world. It is still spreading rapidly in some countries, Vietnam and Indonesia in particular. Since its main vectors of transmission are powerful human drives - sex and addiction - it should not surprise us that, as soon as vigilance is relaxed, infections pick up again. This has happened even in the countries most successful at raising awareness about Aids, from Uganda to the US.

But those who have been sceptical for years about the UN model of measuring HIV and Aids have been vindicated. None more so than James Chin, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Berkeley. Dr Chin’s book, The Aids Pandemic, published this spring, is not only a highly readable primer on Aids but also an attack on established ways of measuring its prevalence. Dr Chin has long suggested the late 1990s as the moment when the incidence of Aids levelled off, has zeroed in on the problem of over-reliance on prenatal sentinel sites and noted the particular weakness of the UN’s Indian data as early as 2005. He accuses Peter Piot, the Belgian who has run UNAids since its founding in 1995, of “epidemiologic nonsense”.

Dr Chin describes UNAids’ epidemiology with the Horatian expression splendide mendax - meaning untruthful to a noble end. It sought “to avoid further stigmatisation” of infected groups, Dr Chin believes, and fostered a climate in which the public remained “fearful about HIV infections ‘jumping out’ from these foci of infection to spread into the ‘general population’”. This was an unlikely outcome, in Dr Chin’s view, but such worries kept vigilance and fundraising high. Helen Epstein, the molecular biologist and author, also said this week that the old numbers had “fitted perhaps a certain fundraising agenda”. While UNAids’ budget has grown exponentially in the past decade, it still complains, plausibly enough, that it is billions short of the money it needs to do its necessary work.

Against the accusation that its numbers served an agenda, UNAids replied that it would have been “technically impossible” to manipulate data systematically, since they arose from surveys taken by different authorities in different countries. That is true, but off the subject. The raw country numbers were not the source of the error; the UN’s models and procedures were. All the UN’s important errors ran in the same direction; they were all overestimates Whether those errors were pardonable mistakes or intentional distortions does not matter as much as it seems. What matters is accountability. Who vets the UN’s scientific assertions? If the answer is “no one”, then it is fair to ask: how much of what the UN is saying about global warming, or Darfur, or infantile dysentery is genuine analysis and how much is hyperbole meant to rally troops and muster resources?

We have assumed, with justification, that the nation-state is inadequate to fight a big global crisis such as Aids. But we also assumed, naively, that the new multinational structures would possess the same accountability that nations do. They don’t. Under the old system, the government rallies public support and tax money towards a given end. The loyal opposition keeps jealous watch over whether the means to that end are ethical and in the national interest.

The new system works differently. Trustworthy international bodies provide an assessment of a crisis, which is assumed to be impartial. Politicians and other celebrities then rally their publics to donate in the spirit of voluntarism. George W. Bush, for example, has put the US on the hook for $15bn worth of help to Aids-ravaged countries in Africa, This initiative relies on data from UNAids and other sources to silence opponents who would rather spend the money on well-documented domestic needs such as, say, hurricane relief. There are advantages to this new system. It can be considerably more responsive. It resembles a small-town fire department more than a traditional deliberative town meeting. But it will lose legitimacy if the reports of fire prove politicised or exaggerated.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

I don’t believe in homogeny of opinion. I don’t begrudge anybody their point of view. What I mind is the lack of liberty to explore or hold that point of view. The aidstruth cabal actively attacks, suppresses, and tries their damndest to silence any who oppose them.

My issue with them is not that I think they’re incorrect in their analysis of the situation - it’s that they allow no other to exist.

If you would forbid them from existing, you’d be them.