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Aids: Controversy over the disease still rages
By Lucy Kirauni

The emerging notion that the HIV virus may not be the real cause of Aids leaves some people dumbfounded and others furious.

Two weeks ago, Uganda played host to both the orthodox and ‘dissident’ scientists in the HIV/Aids debate. The dissidents are calling for a reappraisal of Aids.

On the same day that Prof Luc Montagnier, the man who in 1993 claimed to have discovered the HIV virus, added kissing to the list of possible modes of transmission, dissident scientists were disputing the very existence of the virus.

The focus of both groups was Africa which has been portrayed as the epicentre of the Aids scourge.

Addressing medical scientists at the Kampala Sheraton Hotel, Montagnier said there is a possibility that saliva can now carry the HIV virus.

He added that the deeper the kiss the higher the risk of getting the virus.

“The risk of saliva transmission is very low but we cannot eliminate it completely,” he said. Montagnier was on a two-day visit to Uganda to work with scientists there to find out ‘co-factors’ that make HIV infection as well as progression of Aids faster in Africa than in Europe and America.

On that same day an International Aids Conference was going on at the Uganda Martyrs University in Nkozi, Uganda.

South Africa’s Chief Family Practitioner, Prof Sam Mhlongo, told participants that there is no existing evidence that the Human Immuno Deficiency Virus (HIV) causes Aids or that it even exists.

Mhlongo, who is also a member of President Thabo Mbeki’s Aids Advisory panel, said that the HIV virus has not yet been isolated.

“The only way we can close the Aids debate is by isolating the virus,” he added. He challenged Montagnier to show evidence that he had isolated the virus.

The Nkozi conference had brought together medical scientists, sociologists, political analysts, health workers, journalists, and long term HIV-positive survivors from across the world.

Delegates to the Nkozi conference urged Africa to reject the term “co-factors”. They said that what Montagnier refers to as “co-factors” are realities in Africa.

They called for the treatment of diseases instead of lumping them together as Aids. They said that £80 billion spent every year on HIV/Aids research should be channelled to more pressing health issues in Africa.

They decried what they termed bloated HIV/Aids statistics on the continent . In some cases, they said, the figures are based on tests carried out in ante-natal clinics followed by an extrapolation.

The delegates to the conference also rejected the notion that Aids originated from Africa.

The idea that Aids originated from Africa was dismissed as biased and racist.

Said Uganda Martyrs University Deputy Vice-Chancellor Prof Peter Kanyandago, “negative imaging and stereotyping of Africans has led to the justification that Aids originated from Africa”.

Kanyandago said that today it is taken for granted that for Africa to find a solution to Aids, we must accept loans and drugs from the west.

He called for African solutions to African problems. “Africa is not poor but it has been impoverished”, he said.

As the Aids debate rages, most African governments are urging pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of anti-retrovirals and protease inhibitors.

“Drugs that are not working in the West are being dumped in Africa,” said Dr Rheeta Moran, Senior Researcher at Salford University, UK.

Kevin Corbett, Senior Lecturer in Primary Care, St George’s Hospital Medical School and Kingston University, London, criticised HIV testing especially in Africa.

Cobertt says that the tests are inaccurate, unspecified and insensitive.

“African Aids statistics in most cases are based on a single Elisa test. The tests are administered even on pregnant women despite the warning on the Elisa test kit that pregnancy registers a false anti-body positive,” he said.

“The HIV test looks for the presence of anti-bodies and pregnancy is one of the conditions that registers a positive result,” says Mhlongo.

He added that diseases prevalent in Africa such as malaria, SLE (Systemic Lupus Erythematosis), dysentery, tropical diarrhoea, dehydration, rheumatic athritis, hepatitis, flu vaccine, drugs (especially nitrites) and many more will also register an anti-body positive.

He said that Aids has been used for more than 70 known diseases.

One of the problems for health practitioners highlighted at the conference was that full legal responsibility resides with them since the manufacturers of all HIV test kits have disclaimers on their products.

The HIV debate was sparked in 1987 with the publication of a lengthy paper by Dr Peter Duesberg, one of the world’s leading retrovirologists, in the journal Cancer Research, in which he argued that HIV could not possibly be the cause of any immunological disorders.

Duesberg argued that, first of all, retroviruses as a special class of viruses do not, by definition, kill cells. They are latent; they do not ‘do’ anything and, therefore, could not possibly cause the massive cell destruction seen in Aids.

He argues that HIV fails the set of rules laid down by the German bacteriologist Robert Koch, who established the cause for several infectious diseases at the end of the 19th Century.

These criteria are that it must be present in every single case of the disease; it must be isolated and grown in a laboratory and the purified germ must cause the same disease when transferred to another host (an animal model, for instance).

Early this year, South African President Thabo Mbeki wondered whether western approaches to Aids theory and treatment were right for African countries.

Mbeki, has been accused of flirting with the dissidents. He defended his right to consult with Aids dissenters by asserting that it “would constitute a criminal betrayal of our responsibility to our people” if his government did not explore all avenues of combating Aids.

At the end of the Nkozi conference delegates made recommendations for Africa which included:

· that Africa should suspend all HIV/Aids testing until the virus has been isolated;

· African countries suspend use of anti-retrovirals for treatment of Aids until the virus is isolated;

· governments develop and use a framework for legal litigation against anyone promoting use of toxic drugs;

· that search for an HIV vaccine be suspended and resources re-routed to more pressing health problems;

· African scientists be encouraged to carry out their own research;

· encourage use of tried, tested and researched African non-toxic remedies;

· setting up of an African research institute and care centre and,

· all adverts relating to HIV/Aids be banned.

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