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african inhabitants' death sentence by Alex Burns (alex@disinfo.com) - June. 02, 2001 |
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"We cannot blame everything on a single virus. Poverty is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicap, disability, starvation, mental illness, suicide, family disintegration and substance abuse." A US Army bio-warfare weapon accidentally unleashed that has run amok. A diabolical eugenic plot to rid the Earth of undesirables. A pandemic specter designed to create mass hysteria, boosting global pharmaceutical funding. A media casualty in the battle for Western geo-economic dominance. 'They' laugh at our Black Death analogies, 'They' laugh when we refuse to believe that this genocide came from a spontaneously mutating monkey virus. For two decades, the AIDS conspiracy underground has debated alternate paradigms to the dominant HIV retro-virus model accepted by medical establishment scientists. Spread through samizdat pamphlets and Web sites, AIDS conspiracies suddenly became a 'hot' story item in the controversy generated by South African president Thabo Mbeki's opening remarks to the XIII International AIDS Conference, held in Durban (South Africa) between 9-14 July, 2000. Mbeki questioned if South Africa's health infrastructure had the right priorities to battle the looming AIDS epidemic. He dared to flirt with 'dissident' AIDS theorists, notably Peter Duesberg (professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley). Duesberg has contended that the African AIDS strain is not a specific clinical disease, but that "it is impossible to distinguish clinically African AIDS diseases from previously known, and concurrently diagnosed, conventional African diseases. Thus African AIDS is clinically unspecific, unlike microbial diseases, but just like some nutritionally and chemically caused diseases." Five thousand researchers and scientists signed the Durban Declaration, a document re-affirming the HIV-AIDS link, case closed thankyou. What angered the 10,000 International AIDS Conference members, was Mbeki's query of the AIDS-HIV link, considered a rebuff. Formulaic editorials decried Mbeki's pariah status, and suggested that the African Renaissance had been derailed by internal African National Congress politics. Glaxo Wellcome announced it was slashing anti-HIV treatment drugs for the African market; US President Bill Clinton initiated a $1 billion regional aid package; and we close tonight's news report with the familiar image of starving African youth (who can now afford virginity tests). Mbeki's remarks on poverty were not news to medical specialists. An inadequate health infrastructure and harsh socioeconomic conditions have assisted the spread of AIDS throughout Africa. Civil wars and unstable flashpoints that rely on remainder Cold War weaponry (and baffle geo-strategic analysts by their non-conformity to ethnic/tribal conflict models) ensure the required democratic developmental institutions rarely gain a foothold to be truly effective. The pragmatic Mbeki has also come under fire regarding his free-market economic stance. Microeconomic reform has not delivered promised savior investors; now the embattled ANC is caught in a face-off with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), South Africa's powerful labor union, for the country's "hearts and minds." Disenfranchised African-Americans have long suspected a neo-colonialist agenda. Counterculture icons including Noam Chomsky and former Rage Against The Machine vocalist Zack de la Rocha have perceived Western complicity: the World Trade Organization's regressive patent scheme favor a pharmaceutical oligopoly which inflates prices; post-Cold War turbo-capitalist policies ignore African redevelopment. UNAIDS/UNICEF statistics are chilling: in 1999 alone, 2,200,000 Africans died of AIDS. 90% of those with HIV cannot afford to treat it. Sadly, we seem too fatigued to care for solutions requiring more action than purchasing Live Aid II pay-per-view. The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd. |
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HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report European Center for Epidemiological Monitoring of AIDS AIDS 2000 American Foundation for AIDS Research Drug InfoNet: AIDS UCSF AIDS Research Institute HIV InSite XIII International AIDS Conference: Webcast National Institute of Virology Mbeki's Muddle: South Africa's AIDS Debate UNAIDS: The Joint UN Programme On HIV/AIDS Medical University of Southern Africa A Political Economy of South African AIDS Center for AIDS Prevention Studies AIDS in Africa: The Orphaned Continent Glaxo Wellcome, USA UNICEF: Breaking the Silence AIDS Foundation of South Africa Peter Duesberg on AIDS Conscious Rasta Perspectives PANOS: Information and Communication for Sustainable Development AIDS Battle Loses its Bravest Little Soldier Take Your Medicine Turning Point CIA World Factbook: South Africa |
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