AIDS in Africa: puzzling, harrowing pictures

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Nov, 2005 by Marcus A. Cohen

The descriptive statistics for Africa indicate how poor African countries are. With poverty on the African scale, malnutrition, an unambiguous cause of compromised immunity, is widespread. In tropical Africa, AIDS and HIV sero-positivity are virtually synonymous with regions where malaria is endemic.... In some African medical practices unsterilized needles and shared syringes are used on a scale which would be intolerable in industrialized countries. Pathogenic and other contaminants are thereby transmitted in blood transfusions and inoculations with penicillin and other injected drugs and vaccines. To this can be added the officially unacknowledged but widely known drug abuse problem in many African countries. There is also a huge incidence of all forms of sexually transmitted diseases. Most of these are treated by an injection, facilitating transmission of several pathogens when done with non-sterile equipment. All of this, combined with inadequate medical care, contamination and shortage of water and food, huge population movements and the diseases which accompany political revolution and war, contribute strongly to the increase of AIDS-defining diseases in Africa.

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Craven BM, et al, Time consistency and the development of vaccines to treat HIV/AIDS in Africa, Economic Issues, Vol. 8, Part 1, 2003.

Out of Africa is the title of a memoir by the Danish author Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen, 1885-1962). Dinesen wrote in English, with a brilliance equaled by just two other modern literary masters whose native language was not English; Joseph Conrad (1857-1924, Polish), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977, Russian). Her memoir (published in 1938), recounts the years she spent as owner/manager of a coffee plantation in Kenya (1914-31); and the landscapes and Africans she recreates--seen through the eyes of a European colonist--have a nostalgic, idyllic glow about them.

Spin published a two-part report in 1993 (March, April), also titled "Out Of Africa." Celia Farber, the reporter, had begun covering AIDS in the late 1980s. She wrote her report after traveling through central Africa with Joan Shenton, an award-winning British documentary filmmaker, (1) and Dr. Harvey Bialy, a molecular biologist and scientific editor of the journal, Bio / Technology, who'd spent several years lecturing in microbiology at the university level in Nigeria. Shenton was researching a new documentary for Dispatches, a British TV program that had regularly questioned the medical establishment's position on AIDS.

"We wanted to see it all with our own eyes," said Farber, "to see how the real picture matched up with the picture we'd been given." (2) I'll venture that Farber had read Dinesen's memoir (and/or seen the 1980s film based on the book), and her reuse of the title was ironic; the latter-day African scenes and people that passed before her eyes had nothing in common with Dinesen's Africa. Here's Farber's description of the Rakai District, Uganda:

"We were the only car on the road. Joan and I, seated in the back, stared out the car windows, silenced by the sight. It was as if the whole place had been shredded--a chaos of dust and debris, rotting wooden shacks, garbage, people in rags, children in rags. The poverty in Uganda was crushing, total, and unrelenting. As we drove deeper and deeper into the Rakai District, the 'AIDS epicenter of the world,' all this talk of HIV and T-cells and safer sex started to seem a little absurd. We got out of the car and surveyed what looked like a swamp, with a pipe emerging from it. This was, it turned out, the surrounding villages' water supply. It was also where the sewage was deposited. People looked listless, malnourished. Many of the children had swollen bellies, the telltale sign of malnutrition.

"'Don't ask them what they eat,' advised one doctor we spoke to. 'Ask them how often they eat.'

"The nearest hospital was miles away. There were no cars; the only means of transportation were donkeys and the occasional bicycle. The Ugandan government sets and enforces fees for medication, which most people can't afford. It became clear to us that most people living in the Rakai District had no access to health care whatsoever. Malnutrition, filthy water, diseases left untreated--and the WHO [World Health Organization] had come in with 'AIDS educational programs,' instructing people how to use condoms?" (3)

Celia Farber, Joan Shenton, and Dr. Harvey Bialy are among the journalists and scientists anathematized for questioning the medical orthodoxy's holiest tenets in AIDS: that HIV is the condition's primary cause, and that antiretroviral drug cocktails extend survival.

Still, the number of "heretics" has increased since Farber published her eyewitness account of AIDS in Africa. Today, it includes several Nobel laureates and other distinguished medical and scientific figures. That these HIV-AIDS heresies are spreading has goaded members of the medical ultra-orthodox to suggest charging the dissenters with genocide and criminally prosecuting them. (4)