Not All Voices Heard At AIDS Conference

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Not All Voices Heard At AIDS Conference.

 

http://www.altheal.org/tevents/bangkok.htm

 

BANGKOK AIDS CONFERENCE NOT LIVING UP TO ITS BILLING.

 

By Marcel Girodian

 

 

The XV International Aids Conference in Bangkok has

the noble theme, " Access For All. " According to the

conference promoters, " we will ensure that all voices,

all experiences and all concerns are represented. "

Unfortunately the truth falls short of the hype. All

voices are not being represented, and access for all

is not being granted, with regard to some very

fundamental and critical issues.

 

Let's take the issue of HIV testing. In the US, most

of Europe and Australia, a person is not considered

HIV infected until a minimum of two criteria have been

satisfied--testing positive first to a screening test,

which is usually an ELISA test, and then to a

confirmatory test, which is almost always the Western

Blot. In the US, in fact, if the ELISA is positive, it

is usually repeated, then if positive again the

Western Blot is run. And if that's positive, the US

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends that the

entire set of tests be run again, on a new blood

sample, to reduce the chances that the tests could be

reacting to one of the over 70 common conditions that

are documented to cause false positives.

 

In Thailand, on the other hand, people are routinely

pronounced HIV positive based on only two screening

tests--two ELISAs or an ELISA and a GPA. The more

specific Western Blot is used only if the two

screening tests disagree. This has many problems. The

ELISA and similar tests were developed to be super

sensitive, as a means of screening blood donations.

This means they are more likely to be falsely reactive

to almost any condition that causes antibody

proliferation in the blood. These conditions can be as

common as the common cold, flu, herpes, pregnancy or

past pregnancy, drug abuse, numerous viral and

bacterial infections and many others. Moreover,

according to Dr. Praphan Phanuphak, Aids specialist at

Chulalongkorn University, in Thailand both tests are

usually run on the same single blood sample, which

means that if there is some condition causing a false

positive, nobody is bothering to wait for the

condition to clear and then get a second sample to be

sure before declaring the unfortunate person positive.

 

The US CDC, in its role as Aids advisor to the Thai

government (indeed, they have an office in the Thai

Ministry of Health Building and offices in large

cities throughout Thailand) is not raising its voice

in objection to what is a dubious and very cavalier

procedure for branding Thai people HIV positive--a

procedure that would have a doctor called up for

malpractice were it to be done in the US. A procedure

that violates CDC's own recommendations for Americans.

A simple question is--why? Why is there one HIV

positivity standard for westerners, and a different,

more lax one, for Thais?

 

The answer generally given is that the Western Blot

test is too expensive for poorer countries. But,

according to Dr. Phanuphak, the WB costs only about

$30 US in Bangkok. So, while the AIDS establishment

wants to ensure " access for all " to highly toxic AIDS

drugs which, even in Thailand, cost hundreds to

thousands of US dollars a year, per person, they are

not willing to provide access for all to a $30 test

that could acquit Thai people of being HIV positive in

the first place.

 

How likely a possibility is that? In a study conducted

in Russia, 30,000 people tested positive on the ELISA.

Of these, only 66 could be confirmed by a positive

Western Blot. (Voevodin, A. 1992) In a study published

in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1988, 60 to

70% of twice-positive ELISAs were not confirmed by

Western Blot (Burke, et al). In a study published in

the Journal of the American Medical Association, 30 to

80% of twice-positive ELISAs were not positive on the

Western Blot. (Sloand et al, 1991) The medical

literature has many studies that have reached similar

conclusions.

 

But what of those cases in Thailand where the Western

Blot IS used? It is generally only used as a

" tiebreaker " if the two screening tests disagree. But

even then, the test is evaluated differently in

Thailand than it is in the west. According to Dr.

Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn of UN Aids, only two of the 10

bands (which are supposed to represent HIV proteins)

on the Western Blot test must be reactive to the

person's blood in Thailand in order to declare a

person positive. In the US, generally three or more

bands are needed. In France and Australia, usually

four bands must react before a person is called

positive.

 

Whether called positive based on two screening tests,

or on a Western Blot, a HIV positive Thai person could

conceivably emigrate to the West and become HIV

negative. As a group of scientists from the University

of Western Australia, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Dr.

Valendar Turner, Dr. David Causer and Dr. John M.

Papadimitriou, concluded, " Many HIV positive Thais

would not be HIV positive in the West. "

 

No AIDS expert has ever provided any logical

justification for these differing HIV positivity

standards. Since the countries that pronounce people

positive without a Western Blot (in Africa, even

without any test at all) are generally developing

countries, one suspects that " HIV " positivity is

politically, not medically defined. As testing

positive ruins a person's life, one must ask, who

decided that Western lives are more valuable than

those of Thais or Africans? Under whose influence have

these dubious testing procedures been implemented, and

why has nobody in a position of responsibility

challenged them?

 

As anyone with a modicum of sensitivity should know,

testing positive for HIV antibodies produces

staggering psychological stress and turmoil in a

person, which by itself is proven to suppress the

immune system and make a person more likely to get

ill. It is well documented that many people commit

suicide shortly after being declared HIV positive.

Nobody should be branded with the stigma " positive "

and have their lives crushed on relaxed criteria that

would not be allowed in richer countries.

 

Another way that the XV International Aids Conference

is not providing " Access For All " is that they are not

allowing alternative opinions about the nature and

causation of AIDS to be heard. People in Thailand are

not allowed to know that there are literally hundreds

of fully credentialed doctors and scientists,

including two Nobel Prize winners, who don't think

that HIV is the cause of AIDS, don't think the tests

are valid, and point out that the AIDS medicines are

toxic and immune-suppressive and capable of causing

AIDS all by themselves. You can see a list of these

scientists and quotations from them at

http://aras.ab.ca/articles/AIDSQuotes.htm

 

There are many bizarre anomalies about Aids in

Thailand that have never been explained. Unlike in the

west, where the disease is overwhelmingly restricted

to male homosexuals and drug addicts, in Thailand the

epidemic is said to be almost entirely heterosexual.

Yet approximately 80% of the actual recorded

" heterosexual " Aids cases in Thailand have been males.

This is despite the fact that females, due to their

much more receptive genital anatomy, have been found

to be 8 times more likely than males to become

infected from a single act of vaginal sex (Padian, et

al, 1997). If HIV is the cause of AIDS, why aren't

most of Thailand's AIDS cases female? Why are they

overwhelmingly male, just as they are in the west?

 

The idea that the epidemic is caused by heterosexual

sex in Thailand, and not by drug use or homosexual

anal sex, as it is in the west, is largely based on

interviews with people who test positive. But

scientists conducting such studies routinely overlook

the fact that people lie when self-reporting about

stigmatized activities like homosexuality and drug

use. We know that Thailand has an unusually large

percentage of homosexual males, especially in the

north. And, with Thailand's severe drug laws, a person

would have to be crazy to admit to a

government-connected researcher that he uses illegal

drugs. Recreational drugs, whether injected or

non-injected, can cause false positive HIV tests, and

where are these drugs most available? Why in Northern

Thailand, of course, adjacent to Burma and the golden

triangle, and, " coincidentally, " the epicentre of

Thailand's Aids epidemic.

 

Since prostitution is declared to be a major vector

for HIV transmission in Thailand, why are the

prostitution centers--Bangkok and Pattaya--not the

epicenters of this epidemic? Why is it the north,

where there is much less prostitution? And how did a

virus that is said to have originated in Africa get to

Northern Thailand in such great numbers? Anyone who

has spent time in Northern Thailand knows that

Africans are about as common there as banana trees are

in Sweden. In the west, prostitutes are almost never

found to be HIV positive unless they are drug users.

Why should this be different in Thailand? Can false

positivity, caused mostly by drug abuse, explain the

high level of HIV positive tests among brothel

workers? It's a perfectly rational explanation that

hasn't been pursued.

 

Thai studies have claimed HIV transmission rates as

high as 1 in 18 sexual contacts. But most studies done

in the west have concluded that HIV only transmits, at

best, 1 in 1000 unprotected contacts, and as little as

1 in 8000 from females to males. Is there something

different about Thai genital anatomy that accounts for

the staggering difference? Previous suggestions that

Thailand had a much more aggressive " subtype E " of HIV

were disproven in 1996 by an expert commission at the

Robert Koch Institute in Germany, which found no

difference in infectivity. Is the discrepancy better

explained by the high incidence in Thailand of

conditions that cause false positives?

 

Dr. Christian Fiala, an Austrian physician who worked

at Chulalongkorn University in the 1980s, has

extensively researched Aids in Thailand. He notes that

the definition of AIDS in Thailand differs from that

in the West. " First, a fungal infection called

Penicillium Marneffei has been added as

Aids-qualifying disease. Thereby increasing the

overall Aids figure by 8 percent, and even more in the

so-called epicenter, the north of Thailand, " he

writes. PM sufferers would not be defined as having

AIDS in the West. And fungal infections are notorious

for causing false positive HIV tests. Nobody has

researched whether PM does this.

 

Fiala also points out that, in Thailand, a so called

" symptomatic HIV-infection " is also counted as an AIDS

case. " Any HIV-positive patient, suffering from one

of… 11 mostly unspecific symptoms will get this

diagnosis, " he says. These people are added to the

AIDS case numbers in Thailand, although they would not

be considered AIDS cases in the rest of the world.

" 'Symptomatic HIV infections' represent more than 40%

of the national figure and are highest in the north of

Thailand, the so called epicenter of Aids,” says

Fiala.

 

So not only would many HIV positive Thais not be HIV

positive in the west, almost half of all Thais

reported as " AIDS cases " would not be considered to

have AIDS in the west.

 

Dr. Fiala also points out that HIV's rapid increase in

Thailand in the 1990s happened at the same time that

Thai sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates were

declining sharply. Since HIV is 100 to 2000 times

harder to transmit than other STDs, if other STDs

decline, HIV should decline much more. Instead it

skyrocketed as other STDs were crashing. This is

impossible behavior for an allegedly sexually

transmitted HIV.

 

Dr. Fiala also finds other baffling contradictions:

" The highest prevalence of STDs is in Bangkok. But HIV

and AIDS are both highest in the North. But STD

prevalence is second lowest in the North. And even if

one looks in more detail at the North one sees that

there is absolutely no correlation between STDs and

AIDS. With Phayao Province having the lowest STD

prevalence and the highest number of AIDS cases in the

North or on the other hand Lamphun Province with the

highest STD prevalence and AIDS cases below average. "

 

Because many Thai bar girls come from Issan, one would

expect Issan to have a high rate of AIDS. Instead,

Issan has one of the lowest AIDS rates of any region

in Thailand. In short, the Thai AIDS data do not

support the idea that AIDS is heterosexually

transmitted. Fiala concludes, " Whatever might be the

cause of HIV-positive tests in Thailand, it can not be

heterosexually transmitted like the other STDs. "

 

People in the US, Europe, Africa and India now have

access to alternative opinions about Aids that are

held by a growing number of medical specialists. Thai

people, living in a culture that does not easily

permit dissent, do not. They have little chance of

finding out that all of the supposed " facts " about Hiv

and Aids have been challenged by fully credentialed

doctors and scientists. Considering that throughout

medical history, the establishment view about all

sorts of maladies has ultimately been proven false, by

now we should have a more enlightened attitude. The

right to hear alternative and dissenting opinions

about medical matters should be a basic human right,

especially to those people branded " HIV positive "

under these very dubious circumstances.

 

But the XV International Aids Conference, sponsored

and financed as it is by the drug companies, will

recognize no such human rights except the right they

claim everyone has to swallow (at public subsidy)

toxic chemotherapy drugs which, though endlessly hyped

as " life-saving, " have never been demonstrated in any

study to actually prolong life. Yes, these drugs often

reduce a laboratory measure questionably called " viral

load " and they seem to raise the white blood cell

count, but there is little evidence that anyone who

takes them actually lives longer. Indeed, two recent

studies from Uganda (Morgan D et al, 2002 and

Collaborative Group on AIDS Incubation and HIV

Survival, 2000) found that unmedicated HIV + Ugandans

lived as long after diagnosis as did HIV + westerners

who were taking the Aids drugs. And these Ugandans had

the disadvantage of being malnourished, while the

westerners had plenty of food. (Malnutrition is the

world's leading cause of immune deficiency.)

 

Though they haven't been proven to extend life, the

AIDS drugs that XV International wants everyone to

have access to have been proven to have many grotesque

side effects such as heart failure, liver failure,

kidney failure, pancreatitis, destruction of blood

cells and bone marrow, nerve damage, psychiatric

problems, anemia, diarrhea, blindness, cancer,

redistribution of bodily fat from the face to the back

(the so-called " Buffalo Hump " ), and muscle

wasting--side effects which are conveniently

attributed to " HIV, " although there are no known

mechanisms by which " HIV " can be causing them.

 

XV International Aids Conference should either address

these issues in a very public way, thereby ensuring

" Access for All " to critical information that might

allow Thai people to see Hiv positivity and Aids in a

new light, or change their slogan to " Access For All

To Our Unvalidated HIV Tests and Extremely Profitable

Drugs, " which perhaps sums up their philosophy more

accurately.

 

Marcel Girodian. E-mail : eloquent7