CHAPTER 5

If, however, despite and perhaps because of this peculiar manner of 'advancing' science, it is true that we have not identified our own unique virus, the question then arises - what methods were used to identify the millions in our country who are said to be HIV-positive?

The response to this question is that blood or saliva specimens were and are subjected to the ELISA test, said to be a test to establish whether specific anti-HIV antibodies exist in the particular specimens.

Yet some scientists have raised questions about whether, in fact, this ELISA or any other test, actually tests for the presence of HIV. But before we deal with this, let us mention what the manufacturers of the ELISA testing kits themselves say.

The manufacturers, Abbot Laboratories, say:

" EIA (ELISA) testing alone cannot be used to diagnose AIDS, even if the recommended investigation of the reactive specimens suggests a high probability that the antibody to HIV-1 is present."
They go on to say:

" Although for all clinical and public health applications of the EIA both the degree of risk for HIV-infection of the person studied and the degree of reactivity of the serum may be of value in interpreting the test, these correlations are imperfect. Therefore, in most settings it is appropriate to investigate repeatedly reactive specimens by additional more specific or supplemental tests."

They also say:

" At present there is no recognised standard for establishing the presence or absence of HIV-1 antibody in human blood. Therefore sensitivity was computed based on the clinical diagnosis of AIDS and specificity based on random donors." (Our emphasis.)

(Quotations taken from: ABBOTT LABORATORIES. Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1. FUVAB FffVI EIA. Abbott Laboratories, 66-8805/R5, January 1997:5.)

Another manufacturer of HIV-testing equipment, Roche, says:

" The amplicor HIV-1 Monitor test is not intended to be used as a screening test for HIV or as a diagnostic test to confirm the presence of HIV infection."

(ROCHE. Amplicor HIV-1 Monitor test. Roche Diagnostic Systems, 13-06-83088-001, 06/96.)

To return to the scientists, Roberto A. Giraldo, MD, a physician and specialist in internal medicine, infectious and tropical diseases, says: (Continuum: Midwinter 1998/9.)

" The scientific literature has documented more than 70 different reasons for getting a positive reaction other than past or present infection with HIV. All these conditions have in common a history of polyantigenic stimulations."
He goes on to say:

" Since there is no scientific evidence that the ELISA test is specific for HIV antibodies, a reactive ELISA test at any concentration of serum would mean the presence of nonspecific or polyspecific antibodies. These antibodies could be present in all blood samples."

Indeed, Dr Giraldo explains in this article that he conducted his own tests at the New York Yorktown Medical Laboratory. He says:

" I first took samples of blood that, at 1:400 dilution (the recommended dilution for the ELISA test), tested negative for antibodies to HIV. I then ran the exact same serum samples through the test again, but this time without diluting them. Tested straight, they all came out positive. Since that time I have run about 100 specimens and have always gotten the same result."

In another article written by Dr Giraldo et al, published in Continuum, Summer 1999, the authors say:

" Some of the conditions that cause false positives on the so-called "AIDS test" are: past or present infection with a variety of bacteria, parasites, viruses, and fungi, including tuberculosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, influenza, the common cold, leprosy and a history of sexually transmitted diseases; the presence of polyspecific antobodies, hypergammaglobulinemias, the presence of auto-bodies against a variety of cells and tissues, vaccinations, and the administration of gammaglobulins or immunoglobulins; the presence of auto-immune diseases like erythematous systemic lupus, sclerodermia, dermatomyositis or rheumatoid arthritis; the existence of pregnancy and multiparity; a history of rectal insemination; addiction to recreational drugs; several kidney diseases, renal failure and hemodialysis; a history of organ transplantation; presence of a variety of tumours and cancer chemotherapy; many liver diseases including alcoholic liver disease; hemophilia, blood transfusions and the administration of coagulation factor; and even the simple condition of aging, to mention a few of them."

Citing various other scientists, such as Seligman M., et al, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine 1984: 311, 1286-1292; and WORLD HEALTH, Magazine of the WHO, 1994; 47(6): 1-31; Giraldo et al write:

" Malnutrition is known as the world's first cause of immunodeficiency. Poverty is the main risk factor for malnutrition. Economical disparities have increased all over the world, but mainly in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as in the larger impoverished strips of the developed cities. Never before has poverty been so prevalent and intense, nor has affluence been so big and concentrated in the hands of so few."

One mystery has always been the reported high sero prevalence of HIV in South Africa of over 15% (as extrapolated from Antenatal Clinic Survey data), compared with rates of 2% in West Africa and the Caribbean. In this regard, the experience of a physician working in an Eastern Cape prison, Dr Stuart A. Dwyer, is of note. His institution of 550 inmates has high rates of men having sex with men, with very little use of condoms. He routinely checks the HIV status of those who present to him with various illnesses, including STD. In the past 5 years, he has noted a sero prevalence of 2.8% for the jail as a whole, but recorded only a few deaths from AIDS-related disease. His conclusion is that the meaning of a positive HIV ELISA test in the African setting needs to be re-examined, and that in his "high risk" group, there is little evidence of an "AIDS pandemic".

(Dr Stuart A. Dwyer, British Medical Journal, 22 September, 2001.)

A number of questions arise from all this.

What do the HIV tests test?

When our own health workers says they have tested people for HIV, what do they mean?

When they say a person is HIV-positive, have they discounted all the conditions, other than HIV, which could make a person falsely test HIV-positive?

If so, how have they done this?

How do they arrive at the figure of millions of HIV-positive people, which they regularly proclaim?

Why do they discount poverty and the various conditions of ill-health it produces, as one of the most obvious causes of immune deficiency?

Surely, it is obvious that for them properly to treat any person who tests HIV-positive, they need to know the exact medical or health condition against which the immune system produces antibodies! This is the case even with veterinary scientists who have to treat cattle!

We say this because exactly the same generic system (the ELISA test) that is used to "test for HIV" in human beings, is also used to test for Foot and Mouth Disease in cattle! When it was used in this country to test our bovine herds for this disease, presumably having been designed to test the specific virus that causes the disease, it recorded many of our cattle as being "Foot and Mouth Disease-positive".

However, further clinical work carried out by both South African and British scientists demonstrated conclusively that all these were false-positives. None of the cattle tested and found to be "positive", in fact suffered from Foot and Mouth Disease!

Apart from the confirmation of the fact, well-known to scientists, that this equipment produces "false-positives", the critical point is that some scientists have made the point that these testing kits are not designed specifically to detect the presence of a particular virus in the human body, HIV. Accordingly, they assert that they do no such thing, in much the same way as, in this case, they detected a non-existent Foot and Mouth virus.

It was for these reasons that the Presidential Scientific AIDS Panel decided to seek an answer to the question - what do the HIV tests test?

Other questions arise concerning the incidence of disease and death in our country. The first questions emanate from the phenomenon of "opportunistic diseases". These are said to attack the body when it has been weakened by HIV.

The US government's Centres for Disease Control (CDC) lists at least 29 of these "opportunistic diseases". These are:

Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, Kaposi's sarcoma, toxoplasmosis, strongyloidosis, aspergillosis, cryptococcosis, candidiasis, cryptosporidiosis, cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, lymphoma of the brain, mycobacterium avium complex, histoplasmosis, isosporiasis, Burkitt's lymphoma, immunoblastic lymphoma, candidiasis of the bronchi, trachea and lungs, encephalopathy, mycobacterium tuberculosis, wasting syndrome, coccidioidomycosis, cytomegalovirus retinitis, salmonella septicemia, recurrent bacterial pneumonia, invasive cervical cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis.
Of course, all these diseases existed before AIDS was discovered. A US activist, Christine Maggiore, has observed that:

" AIDS is a new name for 29 old illnesses and conditions, including yeast infection, diarrhoea, pneumonia, cancer and tuberculosis."

The issue of the diagnosis of AIDS in Africa was "simplified", and made more difficult, by the decision of the WHO that such diagnoses should be based only on four clinical symptoms. This goes by the name of the "Bangui definition".

These conditions are a fever, weight loss of 10 per cent, a persistent cough and diarrhoea.

But as Maggiore comments:

" These four symptoms used to identify AIDS are identical to those associated with common African conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, parasitic infections, and the effects of malnutrition and unsanitary water, all of which have troubled the continent for decades."

One of the questions that arises from all this is what has changed many well-known diseases from being well-known curable diseases into one incurable, and little known disease, called AIDS?

The French physician and historian of medicine, Mirko Grmek, tried to explain the puzzle in the following way:

" (AIDS) is not a disease in the old sense of the word, in as much as the virus is immunopathogenic, that it affects the immune system and produces symptoms only through the expedient of opportunistic infection or malignancy...In the past, a disease was defined either by clinical symptoms or by pathological lesions, which are morphological changes in organs, tissues, or cells. Nothing of the sort, neither clinical symptoms nor lesions, observable by the old means, characterises AIDS. It is not a disease in the sense given to the term before the twentieth century. Persons affected by HIV suffer and die with the signs and lesions that are typical of other diseases. As recently as twenty years ago, these opportunistic disorders were the only reality that physicians could observe and conceptualise."

("History of AIDS" by M. Grmek: Princeton University Press, 1990. Our emphases.)

US Professor of Physiology, Robert S. Root-Bernstein, has written:

" There are no criteria listed in any definition of AIDS that allow a person to fight off AIDS or to be cured of it. Once a person is diagnosed, he or she will have AIDS forever after, regardless of any improvement in state of health and regardless of whether death results from a non-AIDS associated death (for example, heart disease or diabetes.) This is another way in which the definition of AIDS is a medical novelty. A person has pneumonia as long as he or she is symptomatic and the germ causing the disease is present. Destroy the germ and eradicate the clinical symptoms, and the person us cured, regardless of the fact that both antibody to the germ and scarring of the lungs may persist for their lifetime.No such criteria exist for AIDS, despite the fact that some AIDS patients are still alive a dozen years after diagnosis with Kaposi's sarcoma, Pneumocystis pneumonia, and other opportunistic diseases."

Bernstein makes the important observation that:

" This makes AIDS the first disease that no one can survive by definition. (Our emphasis). Not only is this description of AIDS logically bankrupt, it sends the demoralising and inaccurate message to people with HIV or AIDS that they have a disease that is not worth fighting. A more legitimate, and more hopeful, definition must be devised."

Because of all this, it has become imperative for us to know as precisely as possible what our people are dying from, specifically. To say that they are dying of AIDS will not help us in our struggle to improve the health of our people.

As Bernstein says, to say this would be to say our people have a disease that is not worth fighting. This would certainly condemn them to premature death. It is this that would constitute genocide.

Yet the mere report that the government is compiling a report on the causes of death, as reflected in the Notices of Death filed with our Department of Home Affairs, aroused the ire of the omnipotent apparatus, which characterised the search for accurate information about ourselves as "AIDS denial".

Nevertheless, to be able to intervene with regard to the health of our population, we must ask a number of questions, regardless of the anger of the omnipotent apparatus.

What is the incidence of disease among our people?

What are we doing to prevent and treat these diseases, including those described as "opportunistic"?

What are the causes of death among our people?

If deaths are said to be HIV-related, on what is this based, scientifically - i.e. did the cadaver have the HI Virus?

This brings us to the question of treatment.