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begin with has got nothing to do with it. It's based on the "polymerase chain
reaction" (PCR) method of amplifying formerly undetectable amounts of
molecular genetic material in this case, fragments of RNA
that are said to be from HIV by copying them in enormous numbers.
Forbes magazine called it biotechnology's version of the Xerox machine. But
errors are amplified too, by the same amount. The
PCR process will indiscriminately copy dud HIVs that have been neutralized by
antibodies, defectives that never formed properly in the first place, scraps
of free-floating RNA, all of which end up being counted. And incredibly, these
counts are presented as if they represented active viruses detected in the
patient and not creations of the PCR process itself. The Australian
mathematician Mark Craddock has
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shown the mathematical basis of the model to be fatally flawed and based on
wrong assumptions about what the number of RNA fragments says about the number
of free viruses. The inventor of the PCR
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method, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, holds "quantitative PCR" to be a
self-contradiction and dismisses its application in this way as worthless. The
whole point is that if HIV were present and active in the body in the way that
the viral load advocates claim, regardless of the foregoing, it should be
readily amenable to standard virus-counting techniques. It shouldn't be
necessary to use extra-high-sensitivity film to get an image if there's plenty
of sunlight.
The Export Industry: Africa and Asia
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"Everybody knows," from the flow of government and U.N. agency handouts
uncritically passed on by the media that Africa is being devastated by an AIDS
epidemic running out of control, with cases
counted in tens of millions. What they probably don't realize is that the
figures are estimates arrived at by basing very questionable statistical
manipulations on what are often ludicrously small numbers, for example
leftover blood samples in a village prenatal clinic. So when UNAIDS announces
that 14 million
Africans are AIDS victims, it doesn't mean that 14 million bodies have been
counted, but that computers in Geneva have run a model with an assumed
relationship between positive test results and AIDS deaths, and extrapolated
the results to the population of the entire continent. Thus in 1987 the WHO
reported
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1 million cases of "HIV disease" in Uganda. Yet ten years later, the
cumulative number of AIDS cases actually reported was 55,000. Nobody knew what
had happened to the other 945,000. There are
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strong financial and other pressures that encourage the reporting as AIDS of
old diseases that have been endemic on the African continent throughout
history. According to Dr. Harvey Bialy, an American with long experience in
Africa, because of the international funds poured into AIDS and HIV work, "It
has become a joke in Uganda that you are not allowed to die of anything but
AIDS. . . . A friend has just been run over by a truck; doctors put it down as
AIDS-related suicide"
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Unlike the cases in New York and San Francisco, the conditions that are
reported as AIDS in
Africa affect both sexes equally, which should be an immediate indicator that
what's being talked about in the two instances are not the same thing. This is
hardly surprising, since "AIDS" in Africa is accorded a different definition.
The unifying factor that makes all of the 30-odd disparate indicator diseases
"AIDS" in the West is testing positive for antibodies claimed to be specific
to HIV. But in Africa no such test is necessary.
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Virus hunters armed with antibody test kits began descending on the continent
in the mid eighties because of three pointers possibly linking it to AIDS: a
now-discredited theory that HIV might have originated there; the presence in
Africa of an AIDS-related sarcoma (although it had existed in Africa since
ancient times); and the presence of a small number of native Africans among
AIDS cases reported in Western countries. And sure enough, they began finding
people who reacted positive. Furthermore, 250
the numbers were distributed equally between the sexes just what was needed to
demonstrate that
AIDS was indeed an infectious condition, which statistics in the West refused,
obstinately, to confirm.
However, in 1985 a different, "clinical" definition was adopted, whereby
"AIDS" was inferred from the presence of prolonged fever (a month or more),
weight loss of 10 percent or greater, and prolonged diarrhea.
The problem, of course, is that attributing these symptoms to a sexually
transmitted virus invites
indeed, makes inevitable the reclassifying of conditions like cholera,
dysentery, malaria, TB, typhus, long known to be products of poverty and
tropical environments. More insidious, funds and resources are withdrawn from
the support of low-cost but effective traditional clinics and the provision of
basic nutrition, clean drinking water, and sanitation, and directed instead on
ruinously expensive programs to contain a virus that exists for the most part
in WHO statisticians' computers. Since it's decreed that
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"AIDS is caused by HIV," cases diagnosed according to the above definition are
attributed to HIV
presumptively. But studies where actual tests have been conducted show up to a
third as testing negatively making "AIDS" a catch-all that arises from the
loosely interpreted antibody testing.
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For as we've seen, many factors that are common in most African regions, such
as malaria, leprosy, parasitical infections, TB, can also test positive. This
is a particular problem in Africa, where the population carries a naturally
high assortment of antibodies, increasing the probability of cross-reactions
to the point of making any results worthless. A study in central Africa found
that 70 percent of the reported HIV positives were false. Nevertheless, the
official reports attribute all positives to HIV, 253
making every instance automatically an AIDS statistic. Of the resulting
numbers, every case not known to be a homosexual or drug abuser is presumed to
have been acquired through heterosexual transmission, resurrecting tendencies
to sexual stereotyping that go back to Victorian racial fantasies.
Given the incentives of limitless funding, a glamorous crusader image, and
political visibility, it isn't difficult to discern an epidemic in such
circumstances. People in desperate need of better nutrition and sanitation,
basic health care and education, energy-intensive industrial technologies, and
productive capital investment are instead lectured on their morals and
distributed condoms.
With the hysteria in the West now largely abated (although at the time of
writing early 2003 a campaign seems to be gathering momentum, targeting
blacks), the bandwagon has moved on to embrace other parts of the Third World
too. This follows a pattern that was set in Thailand, where an
AIDS epidemic was said to be raging in the early nineties. Now, it so happens
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