THE Senate is near to
passing a massive $50 billion Emergency Plan for HIV/ AIDS Relief - a
bill whose priorities are based on myth, just like virtually all
anti-AIDS efforts worldwide.
The world's top AIDS bureaucrat recently admitted the truth: "It is
very unlikely that there will be a heterosexual epidemic" outside
Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization, told
London's Independent newspaper. His bosses at the United Nations issued
an official denial - but couldn't truly challenge his science.
The effort to "democratize" AIDS dates back to the mid-1980s, when
the media and health officials began a desperate and concerted effort
to divert attention and make it seem everyone was at risk. The 1985
Life magazine cover, blaring "NOW NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS" in huge red
letters, represents this effort. Surgeon General Everett Koop coined
the term "heterosexual AIDS explosion" in 1987, while in 1993 HHS
Secretary Donna Shalala told Congress that AIDS may leave "nobody
left."
Even today, the Centers for Disease Control's HIV/AIDS Web site
refuses to acknowledge any difference in the risks of AIDS between
anal, vaginal or oral sex.
Peter Piot, now executive director of UNAIDS, warned as late as
1997 that "HIV will cut through Asian populations like a hot knife
through cold butter." UNAIDS's 2001 estimate had 30 million infected
adults in sub-Saharan Africa.
Last year, the UN had to cut that Africa figure by almost half -
and drop its Asia number by 38 percent from just the year before. Dr.
James Chin, a former top AIDS epidemiologist at the World Health
Organziation, has long declared the UN figures to be to too high and
insists they still are.
In fact, there was never any indication AIDS had or would
"break out" from the well-defined risk-behavior groups, as I was
writing as far back as 1987 and in my 1990 book "The Myth of
Heterosexual AIDS."
I'm no Nostradamus. I merely analyzed public data and studies
showing how terribly difficult the disease is to transmit vaginally or
orally. But the myths are still the basis for AIDS policy.
The group Fair Allocations in Research compiles statistics on
federal spending to fight various diseases, compared to how many
Americans each disease kills. Measured that way, we spend 21 times as
much on AIDS as cancer - and 78 times what we spend on coronary artery
disease, 97 times anti-stroke spending.
Plus, the Ryan White Act mandates taxpayer handouts to HIV/AIDS
victims of about $1.2 billion a year. We have no remotely similar
program for victims of any other disease.
The same official grotesque distortion holds internationally. Chin
charges that the United Nations puts HIV/AIDS victims on a pedestal
while other disease victims stay submerged in deadly muck.
Robert England (who heads the charity Health Systems Workshop)
recently made the same point in the British Medical Journal: "Although
HIV causes 3.7 percent of [worldwide] mortality, it receives 25 percent
of international health-care aid."
"In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention,"
declared Sam L. Ruteikara, co-chair of Uganda's National
AIDS-Prevention Committee, in a Washington Post essay this week. "AIDS
is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar
industry."
Consider: A 2008 WHO/UNAIDS/UNICEF report demands AIDS drugs for
every victim worldwide, requiring spending hikes from $8.1 billion now
to $35 billion by 2010. Yet AIDS remains incurable. Conversely, an
African with non-resistant tuberculosis is curable with merely $25 of
drugs.
"Easily preventable diseases are still killing millions of children
each year, while billions of dollars are being squandered annually by
AIDS programs . . . who are not at risk," says Chin. (Yes, the Senate
bill funds anti-TB and -malaria programs - but not anything like its
anti-AIDS spending.)
The skewed priorities even hurt AIDS efforts. "UNAIDS' perpetuation
of the myth that everyone is at risk of AIDS has led to billions wasted
on prevention programs," Chin insists. "Insufficient outreach programs
for those in the highest-risk population have clearly led to infections
that could have been prevented."
Ruteikara says, "The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV
plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international
AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit
people's sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force
their casual-sex agendas upon us." And now, "as fidelity and abstinence
have been subverted, Uganda's HIV rates have begun to tick back up."
There is no precedent in history for such myth-driven
"democratization" of a disease, nor for the abominable unfairness in
allocating funds away from so many curable illnesses. Says England: "We
have created a monster with too many vested interests and reputations
at stake."
Michael Fumento is director of Education and Research for the American Security Council Foundation in Washington, DC.
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