It is estimated that 42 million people are now infected with HIV worldwide, of which over 30 million live in Africa where the plague has already killed 15 million. Think about this for a moment, this is a population three times the size of the total population of this island or twice the size of London. In parts of southern Africa, two in five adults are now infected and in Zimbabwe, where the brutal rule of a dictator has led to economic collapse, as many as three quarters of a million children are presently orphaned by the disease. How could this terrible situation be allowed to happen?
In many ways, the story of AIDS in Africa is an untold story, a sad story, one of medical ignorance, one of political expediency and lastly a willingness of the South African government under the stewardship of Thabo Mbeki to allow pseudoscience to masquerade as science. The story also involves Professor Peter Duisberg, from the University of Berkeley, California who discovered the first oncogene in 1970. During the 1990’S, Duisberg started making two astonishing claims. The first was that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and the second was that that HIV was not a single disease. He wrote these in a series of fifteen articles entitled AIDS: Have we been mislead? and in a book Inventing the AIDS Virus. In the early chapters of the book, Duesberg presents the historical background leading up to the so-called discovery of HIV. He recounts how scientists in history had blamed infectious agents as causes of common diseases such as scurvy, beriberi and pellagra and he questions the scientific integrity of Robert Gallo, who was the first one to lay claim to the discovery of the virus that caused AIDS. In the second part, he gives the definition of AIDS and presents his major arguments and supporting evidence against the HIV theory. He says if an infectious agent caused AIDS, one would expect it to have five specific characteristics.
(1) It would spread randomly between the sexes, whereas in Europe and the Us, men are affected more commonly than women.
(2) The disease should rapidly appear within months rather than taking a median of nearly ten years.
(3) It should be possible to identify ‘active’ and abundant HIV microbes in each case whereas the complete virus particle is difficult to isolate in patients with AIDS.
(4) We should see a consistent pattern of symptoms in those infected whereas these can vary enormously between Africa, where severe reductions in weight occur, and the US where pneumocystis pneumonia is common.
In Duesberg’s view, recreational drugs such as nitrite inhalants amongst homosexuals caused the Western form of AIDS and the African type was associated with cofactors such as malnutrition and poverty. A standoff occurred between Duesberg and the scientific community and I remember the period during the early nineties when the journal Nature denied him the right of reply to a paper that showed that the disease was not related to drug use. John Maddox, the editor of Nature eventually allowed him to reply with 500 words some years later. Unfortunately, Duisberg’s work was read by Thabo Mbeki, who had trained as an economist at the University of Sussex in the UK. Mbeki had a long-term vision about Africa’s Renaissance and he was convinced that poverty was the key factor holding back this advancement. He said “Africa’s renewal demands that her intelligentsia must immerse itself in the titanic and all-round struggle to end poverty, ignorance, disease and backwardness!” In fact, if we are to draw any conclusion about South Africa’s spiral into the depths of this darkest hour, it is his willingness to believe that poverty was directly related to the plague enveloping his country and in doing so, deprive his people of life saving drugs that may have halted the diseases progress. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa’s Minister of Health said that her country would not be bullied into following a Western prescription to an African problem and backed her ineffectual President. In the book, Duesberg also convinced these government officials that AZT was a failed chemotherapeutic agent abandoned in the early 60's due to its excessive toxicity. He went on to argue that AZT might in fact cause AIDS-defining diseases by killing white blood cells in patients. The result was a situation where many scientists and doctors (including myself) reacted against the perceived ignorance of the South African government. In the end, five thousand people (including twelve Nobel laureates) signed the ‘Durban Declaration’ against Mbeki’s idealism and his willingness to listen to the radical theories of dissident scientists. Only recently, has Mbeki acknowledged the devastating tragedy that he contributed to in South Africa. He has at last rescinded his previous decisions and allowed the use of retro-viral drugs to be given to his people. The number of people with HIV Infection in South Africa is now equal to the population of Ireland. The World Health Organisation—which at present spends only 5% of its $1 billion annual budget on AIDS—proposed the goal of 3m people getting anti-retroviral drugs within two years. This is tenfold more than the 300,000 in poor countries now. The plan will be launched in December, with emphasis on Africa. If Thabo Mbeki could have been convinced of the errors of his ideologies earlier, the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people could have been saved. South Africa is now entering the “death phase” of the epidemic, as more patients die than there are new infections. The provision of anti retro-viral drugs slows down the dying, give people much more reason than they now have to get themselves tested, and save countless children from being orphaned. This is a tragedy of ignorance that has occurred in our lifetime.
