THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AIDS Part 3

[Guest guest]

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AIDS Part 3

 

 

Human rights and the medical model of AIDS

The impact that should be the greatest concern is how the AIDS model has

intruded on the reproductive health and rights of women. Pregnant women and

their children have become the single most important target of AIDS science. It

is they who have become the test subjects, and it is on their backs that the

quest to " halt the spread " has been placed. In many places it has become common

- with the sanction of local and international health authorities - to

discourage and even forbid breastfeeding, the single most critical factor in

protecting the infant and establishing the infant immune system. In addition,

cesarean section is now commonly recommended, and often imposed, upon poor

mothers testing positive for HIV.

 

The very worst excesses that accompanied the coercive population control model

of " family planning " that prevailed in the Global South for thirty years -

before the critique finally began to be heard in the period leading up to the

1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo - are now

re-occurring under the banner of the AIDS model, ironically ignored by the very

movement that so valiantly campaigned over thirty long years for women's

reproductive rights and freedom.

 

Added to these perverse practices that have become normal in " development

medicine " , it is now a common practice to feed - and impose if necessary -

" anti-viral " chemotherapies to gestating mothers and their infants, in spite of

the clear evidence that these chemicals are profoundly toxic both to the woman

and to her developing child in the womb and in the first months after birth.

Told not to smoke or use alcohol during pregnancy for fear of damaging the

developing fetus, these same women and their infants are fed - often under

coercion or in the absence of informed consent - AZT and other chemotherapies

and biotoxins whose very purpose is to disrupt the replication of DNA and other

cell development processes, and which profoundly compromise the immune system in

dong so. The only possible justification for such practices is the belief that

these women and their children will ultimately die anyway. This practice is

common in Canada and the United States, and increasingly common in

Africa, where the right to buy and adminster these drugs has become a rallying

cry of international health advocacy.

 

Finally there is the grave question of human experimentation. Medical

experiments on humans, particularly in central and southern Africa, are being

justified by the AIDS model in ways that are unprecedented. Vaccine research now

leads the way, but all manner of human drug testing is being undertaken in

Africa, with the support of national governments, that could never be

contemplated outside the assumptions implicit in the AIDS model. This trend is

reinforced by the global preoccupation with AIDS that dominates foreign aid

budgets of virtually all OECD nations - including Canada's - and the funding

priorities of major globalized philanthropists such as Bill Gates.

 

It is important that we continue to seek and provide alternative information on

AIDS. The public can be, and must be, better informed. The worst effects of this

phenomenon are ignorance and prejudice, and threats to human rights and

opportunities for genuine AIDS victims, as well as for those suspected of

" carrying " the disease. Specific groups in society considered susceptible are

also the most vulnerable - the indigent poor, minorities wherever they live,

women and children as described above, and immigrants and refugees coming to

Canada and other industrialized nations from " non-white " Third World countries,

especially from Africa.

 

Obscuring injustice: the medicalization of underdevelopment

One argument against the plea for restraint that I am making is that we have a

rampant and deadly crisis on our hands, and this crisis demands social risk and

forthright responses, including some curtailment of individual rights in

deference to the rights of the wider group. To challenge this view is difficult,

because in questioning the utilitarian calculations of the international public

health establishment, we risk falling into a polemic that diverts attention from

the reality that legions of poor and marginal around the world are ill and dying

as a direct result of the wretched conditions of their lives, and the acute

immunosuppression that is the chronic condition of the poorest and least

defensible.

 

As I argued at the outset, however, the central villain is not a virus; it is

poverty. And the critical cure is not medicine; it is justice. Meredith Turshen

of Rutgers University and her French colleague, Annie Thebaud-Mony, long ago

warned that AIDS is the most recent, and worst, manifestation of what they refer

to as the " medicalization of underdevelopment "

 

This warning is at the heart of the issue. Root-Bernstein noted that

" AIDS may continue to plague modern society, just as other preventable

infections...plagued our forebears, because of the closemindedness of the very

physicians whose job it is to diagnose, treat and prevent these diseases. A

century ago, they let patients die by denying that germs had anything to do with

diseases. Today they may be letting them die by insisting that the germ is

everything. "

 

He concludes that the importance of the many studies demonstrating that control

of immunological risk factors can lead to quite effective control of AIDS is

that,

" ...they demonstrate the continued validity of one of the oldest and most

fundamental truths of medical science: Public health measures are always more

effective in controlling disease than are all the medicines in the world.

Neither vaccines nor medicines have led to the virtual elimination of typhoid,

cholera, typhus, or plague in the industrialized countries of the world. These

required nothing more than the simple expedients of improved sanitation, sewage

systems, and the control of pests...If we want to control AIDS, it is not

vaccines, antiretroviral drugs, or other medical miracles we need. We need to

solve the social, economic, health education and medical care problems that

create the conditions that permit AIDS to develop in the first place. "

 

We do not have to create impressions of an inevitable medical cataclysm to

justify concern about chronic life-threatening immunodeficiency, nor to promote

the best possible collective measures to deal with it. In the long run these are

social problems, not medical problems, and require political and social

interventions. We should concentrate on the fundamental problems of the

suffering and inflicted: the problems of health, not disease. Before medical

science and charity, what is required is universal social and economic justice,

for without justice the scourge of chronic acute immunodeficiency and its

associated opportunistic conditions will remain as universal as the existence of

poverty itself.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

© Brian K. Murphy, January 2004

Brian Murphy is a activist, author, and policy analyst in global development

issues, working with the Canadian international social justice organization,

Inter Pares. In addition to many major papers and journal articles, he has

contributed to several books and is the author of Transforming Ourselves,

Transforming the World, An Open Conspiracy for Social Change , ZED Books

(London) and Fernwood (Halifax), 1999; also available as De la pensée à

l'action: la personne au coeur du changement social (trans. Geneviève

Boulanger), Ecosociété (Montréal), 2001..

 

************ Levins, Richard, " The re-emergence of infectious diseases on the

public health agenda " . The paper appeared in Third World Resurgence #155/156

(Third World Network, Penang), and was submitted by TWN at the October 12-15,

2003 conference, " Within and Beyond the Limits to Human Nature " , sponsored by

the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Institut Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft.

The full paper is available here. One of the world's foremost biomathematicians,

Richard Levins is the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard

School of Public Health and a visiting scientist at the Institute of Ecology and

Systematics in Cuba.

 

This paper refers to the " global south " rather than " developing " nations, or

simply " the south " . While, for historical reasons, the people experiencing the

most profound and intractable structural poverty are concentrated in the

southern latitudes, they are not found exclusively in the southern hemisphere;

nor are all southern nations, or those within these nations, impoverished and

marginalized equally in the sense that this term is usually used. " Global

south " , a term introduced by Waldon Bello, among others, is used here as a

metaphor for the phenomenon of pervasive entrenched deprivation, economic

marginalization, and political disempowerment concentrated within an

identifiable group of countries.

 

Root_Bernstein, Robert, The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus , MacMillan/Free

Press, NY 1993.

 

Root-Bernstein is one of the world's most eminent scientists and science

historians, whose formative years included extended stints as a research

assistant to both Thomas Kuhn and Jonas Salk. See the extensive curriculum vitae

for Root-Berstein

 

see, for example, Robert Root-Bernstein and Stephen J. Merrill, " Etiology and

Pathogenesis of AIDS " , in: Standish, LJ, C Calabrese, ML Galantino, eds . AIDS

and Complementary & Alternative Medicine: Current Science and Practice , St.

Louis, MO, Churchill-Livingston/Harcourt/Mosby, 2001. Root-Bernstein's

curriculum vitae referred to in the previous endnote cites several other

examples.

 

See Regush, Nicholas, The Virus Within , Viking (Penguin Group), Toronto,

London, New York, 2000.

 

Eckholm, E., " Facts of life. More than inspiration is needed to fight AIDS " , in

New York Times , August 1, 1991, Section 4, page 1, quoted in Root-Bernstein,

The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus , p.64.

 

Root-Bernstein, The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus , p. 67

 

This policy is only now beginning to grudgingly be reversed, see " Breastfeeding

best for infant, HIV mothers in Africa told; Research shows health benefits for

the newborn outweigh the risks of transmitting disease through milk " , By

Stephanie Nolen, in The Globe and Mail (TORONTO) Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004.

 

For one treatment of these issues, see Uncommon Question: A Feminist Exploration

of AIDS , by Women's Health Interaction (WHI, Ottawa, August 1999). Uncommon

Questions is a discussion paper that explores, from a feminist perspective,

dominant HIV/AIDS theory ( " common knowledge " ), and explores (through " uncommon

questions " ) alternative theories, facts and analyses on the relationship between

HIV and AIDS. It reflects on the construction of knowledge about AIDS, vested

interests in the AIDS " paradigm " , and challenges readers to re-think, from a

human rights and social justice perspective, the nature and implications of

chronic acquired immune deficiency, and whether toxic treatments are appropriate

for pregnant women and children. It poses the question, " What if conventional

thinking about AIDS is wrong? " Uncommon Questions includes an extensive

bibliography, as well as an annotated appendix on alternative activists,

theories and organizations. The discussion paper is available here.

 

See Turshen, Meredith and A. Thébaud-Mony, " Combattre le SIDA au nom de la

" civilisation " ? in Le Monde Diplomatique , April, 1991:24.

 

Root-Bernstein, op cit, pp 367-368.

 

 

 

 

 

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