Durban Declaration Rebuttal

Durban Declaration Rebuttal

Commentary

SOME FESTERING QUESTIONS

By Patricia Nell Warren

9/2000 A & U Magazine

Even before the International AIDS conference convened in Durban, 5000 scientists and doctors signed a Declaration that affirmed official AIDS policy and accused dissenters of costing "countless lives". About the same time, a reader wrote A & U to accuse me of denying the AIDS holocaust. Since I never said any such thing, I'd like to lay out my own position about the epidemic. The Durban 5000 do leave some long-festering questions unanswered.

Clearly global disease is curving up. Clearly A & U readers are fighting life-and-death health battles. Yet high economic stakes and horrible social stigmas have made AIDS a deadly political issues -- one whose parameters go way beyond "scientific truth." At no other time in U.S. history has our own government so single-mindedly legislated, law-enforced and court-ordered a single scientific view on its citizens. So I look at U.S. government AIDS policy and wonder how it translates into "scientific truth."

To "deny the AIDS holocaust" would be to deny that people are dying. Individuals who deny the WWII holocaust believe that accounts of Jews dying in Nazi concentration camps are fabrications. I've never denied that there are sick and dying people out there. At first I accepted official government views of the epidemic. But the deaths of several friends -- notably film producer Philip Labhart and fashion model Gene Momberger -- impelled me to start looking closely at the politics behind AIDS science. Gene and Philip both died of "something," but by the time they closed their eyes, both gay men were disillusioned with official AIDS policy.

I've also had my own battles with autoimmune disease, which led me to start writing about chronic fatigue syndrome in 1996.

Here are some festering questions that the Durban 5000 and the U.S. government can't explain away:

#1. Why is AIDS policy so clouded with conflict of interest?

ABCNews medical columnist Nicholas Regush has hammered on conflict of interest more than any other subject. In his weekly "Second Opinion", he notes there are growing numbers of scientists whose cash flow is floated by some agency or corporation with a vested interest in the results. Regush wryly calls it a disease in its own right -- PAID (pecuniary associated infectious disease). Example: during the 1966 breast-implant litigation, women plaintiffs pointed out that a court-appointed panel of experts was heavily PAID.

Conflict of interest keeps an ordinary citizen off a jury. Conflict of interest got Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and other politicians in hot water. Shouldn't it keep PAID scientists from having credibility? One can scan the ranks of high-profile AIDS apologists and easily spot the ones who own AIDS patents or stock in pharmaceutical companies, who pull fat speakers' fees from drug conferences, or whose research was funded by assorted interested parties. If these guys were running for President, they would already be toast over this issue. I wonder how many of the Durban 5000 can afford to have their financial records scrutinized.

#2. With money and influence skewing the relationships among government, industry and science, is public-health policy always "based on scientific fact"?

So sorry, but public health is seldom an altruistic enterprise. Its history is raddled with political expedients and criminal cover-ups. Examples: the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. The effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam troops. Biases in women's health research. The way that chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease (which I've had) and Gulf War disease were initially blown off by the medical establishment.

One of the blackest untold stories: air pollution and respiratory disease. Few people know that the technology for high gas mileage (200 mpg or more) has been around since the 1920s. From every gallon of gas burned by combustion engines, there are dangerous particles and gases churned into the atmosphere. Millions of people living in highly industrialized areas, who died of lung cancer or respiratory disease traceable to bad air quality, or who live with chronic disease because of same, owe their suffering to low-mileage policy. For the past 80 years, hundreds of high-mileage patents have been kept off the market by fierce opposition from the auto and petroleum lobbies, who want to keep the world's vehicles guzzling gas at 10-20 mpg.

One patent, by Canadian inventor C.N. Pogue, proved its effectiveness during World War II when the U.S. military installed it in our North African tanks. Yet after the war, our government decided not to give high mileage to the American people, though it passed along other wartime advances like jet planes, rocket engines, nylon and computers. Pogue's patent went back on the shelf! Even during the 60s and 70s, when science revealed that engine combustion is a major factor in air pollution and respiratory disease, the lobbies continued to fight change. Our government continues to let this happen.

With ugly episodes like these on record, why should anyone have absolute faith that public-health AIDS policy is free of political and corporate interference?

#3. Why do AIDS apologists feel they have to use inflated and inflammatory statistics to make their case?

Right now the U.S. government is trying to stampede Americans into supporting global AIDS aid in billions of dollars -- out of U.S. taxpayers' pockets. The Durban Declaration parrots these statistics. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that estimates of HIV+ Africans vary wildly, depending on who you listen to. Worse, estimates are not based on test results -- in many of the sub-Saharan countries, HIV testing is not widely available. Often the operational word "estimate" is omitted entirely. So why are scientists and government using these unscientific stats? Why are major media not challenging these stats?

Same goes for the U.S. -- in San Francisco, for example, where the Department of Public Health published "statistics" that purported to show that gay male infection was way up again, in the sub-Saharan range. The statistics are being fiercely challenged.

#4. Why did the U.S. government rush with such suspicious speed to help build a global juggernaut of AIDS politics?

Once Washington decided to utter the taboo word "AIDS" in the late 1980s, its first move was to stack the deck by flooding money into HIV research, letting alternative research wither on the vine. Next it speedily criminalized certain actions by HIV+ people, and pressured states to pass their own criminal laws -- a move that went unnoticed by many Americans. More significantly, the U.S. government moved to globalize AIDs policy through its influence with the UN and World Bank. Today no developing country will get WB aid unless they implement the U.S. AIDS model.

How did our wonderful government veer 180 degrees from AIDS denial to AIDS dogma in just a few years. Gosh, it took Washington way longer to turn 180 degrees on the Vietnam War. Did some suit in the State Department get the bright idea that AIDS policy could lever the global economy? Did that emerging new global lobby -- the pharmaceutical industry -- get visions of global profits on vaccines, tests and drugs sold to 6 billion people? If so, did Washington tailor its AIDS policy the way it tailored its gasoline policy?

#5. How much longer will the government and AIDS-science establishment ignore the scientists and doctors who disagree?

Defenders of AIDS policy like to portray dissenters as "a few cranks lined up against mainstream science". Actually the opposition is numerous, and growing.

In 1991 an international task force of scientists and medical practitioners, calling itself the Group for the Scientific Re-Appraisal of HIV-AIDS, published a letter in calling for action. Signers included Nobel prizewinners like Kary Mullis. The Group has some 1000 signers to date. Their questions have a wide range: from from reliability of HIV tests to reliability of drugs -- from whether HIV is really sexually transmitted or a cell-killer, to whether some other pathogen is doing the actual killing. Doubtless the Group would have more signers if it were less dangerous to stick out your neck. After all, dissenting scientists risk loss of reputations and funding. The Durban 5000 are risking nothing.

Add in the 2000+ signers of the newly formed International Coalition to End AIDS Censorship petition. It sprang up after AIDS apologists began attacking South African president Mbeki for his openmindedness on AIDS science and his concerns about AZT, based on widespread reports of its dangers.

#6. Why has our government ignored thousands of reported cases of "HIV-negative AIDS," and their possible connection to CFS?

At first CFS was dubbed "Yuppie flu" because so many initial clusters were reported among white middle-class Americans. More recent studies indicate that CFS affects other ethnic groups and low-income people as well. Some diagnoses of CFS have occurred among that significant body of cases with AIDS-like symptoms who test HIV negative.

Originally the medical establishment tried to dismiss CFS as a psychiatric disorder. The CDC kissed off HIV-negative AIDS cases as a footnote, and created the sideshow category of ICL (idiopathic CD4 T-lymphocytopenia) for those whose T-cell counts fall below 300. Fierce pressures by outraged CFS patient advocates, who were fed up with being brushed off by Washington, finally compelled the CDC to give CFS a place in their world. But so far Washington refuses to investigate possible links between CFS and AIDS. The CDC is still in the process of defining CFS, and insists that it may not even be contagious. Recently patient advocates accused the CDC of misusing CFS funds.

#7. Why does our government keep AIDS positioned as a disease of minorities (gays, blacks, Latinos, women)? And of social groups that many Americans disapprove of (drug abusers, prostitutes, prisoners, single mothers, sexually active teens)?

Right now the narrow definition of AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease means that U.S. public health targets certain groups and social behaviors. "STD" provides a nice neat political and legislative handle. It's called scapegoating, folks.

To re-define AIDS as a broader-based disease -- one that might be transmitted more casually in the general population, as is said to be happening in Africa -- is not something that our government is politically prepared to do. Thanks to all the propaganda, conservative white middle-class American voters now associate AIDS with "fags, druggies, convicts and coloreds". They don't want to be told they're at risk from a disease that they associate with these groups. They also won't put up with the degree of surveillance and control that these "risk groups" are expected to accept. In short, the government cannot comfortably retreat from the heavy-handed policy that it put in place during the Bush administration.

#8. Is it possible that another pathogen, not HIV, may cause the actual destruction of immune systems seen in both AIDS and CFS?

One suspect is HHV-6. The government and the Durban 5000 can't dismiss human herpesvirus 6 so easily.

HHV-6 was discovered in the late 1980s, investigated by Gallo himself. But the government is letting Gallo's HHV-6 research wither on the vine. HHV-6A is the scary strain that deeply concerns some researchers like Carrigan & Knox, Torrey & Yolken. It is reportedly a fierce destroyer of T-cells and has the recombinant-DNA power to operate on endogenous as well as exogenous fronts -- meaning it can be transmitted both vertically (in DNA, from parent to child) and horizontally, from person to person. HHV-6 is linked by some to MS, bone-marrow disease, cancer, Gulf War disease, brain disease, even schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

But so far the government virtually ignores HHV-6A. HHV-6 research is not conclusive yet, but it shows how complex the medical questions are getting in our overcrowded world. According to Nick Regush, we may find ourselves facing some hair-raising questions of inter-related autoimmune diseases.

The most important question of all:

#9. How courageously and honestly will "AIDS" be defined from now on? How free of greed for power and profit will the definition-makers be?

Yes, there IS a holocaust of global disease. And yes, AIDS dissent isn't going away. The Durban 5000 come off like a bunch of Catholic bishops asserting that the Reformation is bunk.

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A scientific rebuttal of the Durban Declaration can be found at http://thedurbandeclaration.org. Additional material can be found at http://www.virusmyth.com.

Bestselling novelist Patricia Nell Warren also writes provocative commentary on current issues. She lives in Los Angeles. Her editorials are archived at http://www.wildcatpress.com.

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