How to shake up your perception of AIDS in one article

spoons and bones · #1 05-31-2006, 10:46 AM

http://www.harpers.org/OutOfControl.html

It's a long piece, but a great fucking read.

Quotes from the article:

Quote:

4. Africa, as the news media never tires of telling us, has become ground zero of the AIDS epidemic. The clinical definition of AIDS in Africa, however, is stunningly broad and generic, and was seemingly designed to be little other than a signal for funding. It is in no way comparable to Western definitions. The “Bangui definition” of AIDS was established in the city of Bangui in the Central African Republic, at a conference in 1985. The definition requires neither a positive HIV test nor a low T-cell count, as in the West, but only the presence of chronic diarrhea, fever, significant weight loss, and asthenia, as well as other minor symptoms. These happen to be the symptoms of chronic malnutrition, malaria, parasitic infections, and other common African illnesses. (In 1994 the definition was updated to suggest the use of HIV tests, but in practice they are prohibitively expensive.) Even when HIV tests are performed, many diseases that are endemic to Africa, such as malaria and TB, are known to cause false positives. The statistical picture of AIDS in Africa, consequently, is a communal projection based on very rough estimates of HIV positives, culled from select and small samples, which are extrapolated across the continent using computer models and highly questionable assumptions.

The article continues by arguing that large drug companies are more than happy to sell billions dollars of drugs by falsifying both the numbers of AIDS victims AND the toxicity of its cure:

Quote:

The failure of the HIVNET researchers to properly control their study with a placebo group is not as unusual as one might think. In fact, this failure is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of AIDS research in general. The 1986 Phase II trial that preceded the FDA’s unprecedented rapid approval of AZT was presented as a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, though it was anything but that. As became clear afterward through the efforts of a few journalists, as well as the testimony of participants, the trial was “unblinded” almost immediately because of the severe toxicity of the drug. Members of the control group began to acquire AZT independently or from other study participants, and eventually the study was aborted and everyone was put on the drug. As in the case of HIVNET, documents obtained by journalist John Lauritsen under the Freedom of Information Act subsequently suggested that data-tampering was widespread. Documents were altered, causes of death were unverified, and the researchers tended to assume what they wished to prove, i.e., that placebo-group diseases were AIDS-related but that those in the AZT group were not. So serious were the deviations from experimental protocol at one Boston hospital that an FDA inspector attempted to exclude data from that center. In the end, however, all the data were included in the results, and the FDA approved the drug in 1987.[11]

AZT was approved in record time, but that record didn’t stand for long. In 1991, the FDA approved another DNA chain terminator, ddI, without even the pretense of a controlled study. Anti-HIV drugs such as Crixivan were approved in as little as six weeks, and cast as a triumph of AIDS activism. This pattern of jettisoning standard experimental controls has continued up to the present, as the HIVNET affair amply demonstrates, and has characterized not only research into new drugs designed to exterminate HIV but the more fundamental questions at the root of AIDS research.

Manhattan · #2 05-31-2006, 03:12 PM

They need to fucking shape up or ship out.

The_Corpse_Bride · #3 05-31-2006, 07:05 PM

ooh.