James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

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N.Y. Wants All Bronx Adults Tested for HIV

Thursday, June 26, 2008 4:45 PM

By: Rick Pedraza

Community-based organizations, hospitals, and health clinics throughout New York City will voluntarily test every adult resident between the ages of 18-64 living in the Bronx for HIV, The New York Times reports.

The decision, announced by The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, comes on the heels of a recent report which shows New York City residents have the highest rate of practicing unsafe sex, and one of the highest HIV rates in the United States.

The Bronx, the report shows, has been hit especially hard.

In 2005, an estimated 250,000 Bronx residents aged 18-64 had never been tested for HIV, and one in four people with HIV did not know they were infected. The report also shows that one out of every four people that found out they were HIV-positive also found out they had full-blown AIDS at the same time.

The department of health website reports the goal of the initiative is that every Bronx resident learns his or her HIV status and has access to quality care and prevention services.  .....

http://www.aliveandwell.org

From: Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives<christine@aliveandwell.org>

June 2008

- From the UK, Officials Say AIDS Pandemic is Cancelled

- India Asks, "Is HIV the Cause of AIDS?"

- New Radio Shows and Podcasts with AIDS Rethinkers

The Big Myth Officially Shattered:

Top AIDS Leader Admits There's No Heterosexual Pandemic

The latest news in AIDS is at least two decades old, but 20 years ago-and as recently as last month-UNAIDS and the World Health Organization continued to deny it, squelching data that showed AIDS was not affecting the general public around the globe.

Back in 1987, Rethinking AIDS board member Gordon Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow, tried unsuccessfully to point out that AIDS predictions didn't add up and that the notion of a global AIDS epidemic among heterosexual populations was at best a huge mistake, or at worst, a dishonest marketing scheme.

Now, hundreds of billions of dollars later, the recklessly ignored facts are coming to light as the top AIDS official at the World Health Organization finally admits there is no evidence that the world at large is--or ever was--at risk for AIDS, and UNAIDS comes under fire for promoting unfounded fear and squandering precious healthcare dollars on a problem that didn't exist.

The new official word on AIDS is the old word: Everyone is not at risk; AIDS is confined to distinct high-risk groups such as injection drug users and men having sex with men...except if you live in certain parts of Africa.

According to the new version of orthodox AIDS-think, unlike other people in other parts of the world, heterosexual Black Africans still remain at high risk for AIDS. Dr. James Chin, former epidemiologist for the World Health Organization, claims this is because 20% to 40% of the adult population in sub-Saharan Africa participates in "multiple concurrent overlapping relationships" involving sexual intercourse with several different people and several changing partners every few weeks.

The startling concept of African AIDS epidemics due to wildly promiscuous Blacks and the remarkable admission that 20 years of global AIDS policy followed a false premise have yet to be reported by any major US media.

Excerpted from the June 12, 2008 UK Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/12/aids.health

The Exploitation of AIDS

By Brendan O'Neill

"The AIDS scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years..."

Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease - with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" - the head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against AIDS said that outside very poor African countries, AIDS is confined to "high-risk groups," and even in these communities it remains quite rare. In other words, all that hysterical fear mongering about AIDS spreading among sexed-up western

youth was a pack of lies.

Much of the media has treated Dr. De Cock's admission as a startling revelation when in truth, experts have known for many years that in the vast majority of the world, AIDS has little impact on the "general population." In her new book The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani - who worked for 10 years in what she refers to as "the AIDS bureaucracy" - admits that by 1998 it was clear that "HIV wasn't going to rage through the billions in the 'general population', and we knew it."

And it isn't the case that the heterosexual pandemic failed to materialize because officialdom's omnipresent pro-condom propaganda was a success. According to James Chin, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the new book The AIDS Pandemic, it was always a "glorious myth" that there would be an "HIV epidemic in general populations." That myth was the product of "misunderstanding or deliberate distortions of HIV epidemiology" by UNAIDS and other AIDS activists, says Chin.

It is time to recognize that the AIDS scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the past 30 years. Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, the "war against AIDS" was turned into moral crusade.

Governments exploited the disease to create a new moral framework for society. Through baseless fear mongering, officials sought to police and regulate the behavior of the public. No longer able to appeal to outdated Victorian ideals of chastity or restraint, the powers-that-be used the specter of an AIDS calamity to terrify us into behaving "responsibly" in sexual and social matters.

They were aided and abetted by the radical left. Gay rights campaigners, feminists and left-leaning health and social workers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in spreading the "glorious myth" of a possible future AIDS pandemic. An unholy alliance of old-style, prudish conservatives and post-radical, lifestyle-obsessed leftists latched on to AIDS as a disease that might provide them with a sense of moral purpose.

And they ruthlessly sought to silence anyone who questioned them. Those who challenged the idea that AIDS would devour sexually promiscuous young people and transform once-civilized western societies into diseased dystopias were denounced as "AIDS deniers" and "heretics." Anyone who suggested that homosexuals were at greater risk than heterosexuals was denounced as homophobic. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of the glorious moral effort to make everyone submit to the sexual and moral conformism of the AIDS crusaders.

Even in Africa, the international focus on AIDS has been motivated more by pernicious moralism than straightforward charity. Diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are bigger killers than AIDS. Yet focusing on AIDS allows western governments and NGOs to lecture Africans about their morality and personal behavior.

The relentless politicization and moralization of AIDS has not only distorted public understanding of the disease and generated unnecessary fear and angst - it has also potentially cost lives. James Chin estimates that UNAIDS wastes around $1billion a year in activities such as "raising awareness" about AIDS in communities that are at little risk. How many lives could that kind of money save?

===

Excerpted from Guerilla News Network, June 13, 2008

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3739

WHO Confesses to 25 Years of Misguided AIDS Policies...But They Still Want You to Believe Them

By Liam Scheff

It's official: AIDS is not explicable by sexual transmission, at least not outside of Sub-Saharan Africans, gay men, intravenous drug users and prostitutes. For the rest of us, there is no heterosexual AIDS pandemic, and further, there will be no heterosexual AIDS pandemic.

"Threat of world AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits," The Independent announced on Sunday, June 8, 2008 (mimicking what I have been reporting for years and what some of my colleagues have been reporting for decades).

But take it from someone you trust, Dr. Kevin de Cock of the World Health Organization (WHO): "[T]here will be no generalized epidemic of AIDS in the heterosexual population outside Africa."

The authorities explain that they misled the entire world, for decades, because admitting the grandeur of their farce would have encouraged their critics: "Any revision of the threat was liable to be seized on by those who rejected HIV as the cause of the disease." Of course! We've got to protect flawed science from criticism!

But, regardless of past and current performance (and admissions of outright massive fraud), the authorities at the WHO and UNAIDS still want you to believe them when they talk about AIDS, Bird Flu, SARS, and other advertised but not achieved super-pandemics.

Such a weak defense might encourage a curious mind to wonder at the other flaws in their paradigm. For example, are we now to believe that there is a virus that causes a fatal disease, but only in Africans, (wherever in the world they may be), gay men and drug addicts? But not the entirety of the human population that is sexually active?

The answer to the riddle may be found in the actual cause of "HIV" - namely, "HIV testing." Figure out who is tested, how the tests work (or, more to the point, how they don't work), and who the tests are said to be accurate for, and you'll get an understanding of how the "AIDS" diagnosis - now, no better than a brand name applied to poverty and drug addiction - actually works.

"HIV tests" come up as "false positives" in numbers far exceeding "true positives":

"Sir, In the May 9 issue of The Lancet, Round the World correspondents discussed AIDS-associated problems in former Eastern bloc countries...I would like to emphasize another alarming concern - namely, the rapid growth in false-positive HIV tests in the former USSR, and in Russia especially. In 1990, of 20.2 million HIV tests done in Russia only 12 were confirmed and about 20,000 were false positives. 1991 saw some 30,000 false positives out of 29.4 million tests, with only 66 confirmations." (The Lancet, June 1992)

They have no ability to determine if someone has or does not have the antibodies they think they're looking for; the interpretation of "HIV positive" is subjective and not consistent:

"At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 and HIV-2 in human blood." (Abbott labs HIV-1/2 test, 1986 to the present).

They don't produce singular or diagnostically specific results - they cross-react all over the map:

"Heterophile antibodies are a well-recognized cause of erroneous results in immunoassays. We describe here a 22-month-old child with heterophile antibodies reactive with bovine [Cow] serum albumin and caprine [Goat] proteins causing false-positive results to human immunodeficiency virus [HIV] type 1 and other infectious serology testing. (CLINICAL AND DIAGNOSTIC LABORATORY IMMUNOLOGY, July 1999)

"False-positive ELISA test results can be caused by alloantibodies resulting from transfusions, transplantation, or pregnancy, autoimmune disorders, malignancies, alcoholic liver disease, or for reasons that are unclear." (Doran, et al. False-Positive and Indeterminate Human Immunodeficiency Virus Test Results in Pregnant Women. Arch Family Medicine, 2000)

The secondary tests that are sometimes used to give a sense of validity to an initial test are either reformulations of the same material (the Western Blot), or are synthetic genetic probes (PCR Viral Load) that likewise cross-react and give no diagnostically specific reaction (and these tests are rarely to never used when you're talking about "AIDS in Africa"):

"Persons at risk of HIV-1 infection have been classified incorrectly as HIV infected because of Western blot results, but the frequency of false-positive Western blot results is unknown." (JAMA. 1998; 280: 1080-1085)

"The HIV-1 PCR assay was designed to monitor HIV therapy, not to diagnose HIV infection...In patients (like ours) with a low prior probability of disease, almost all positive test results are false positive." (False Positive HIV Diagnosis b HIV-1 Plasma Viral Load Testing. Ann Intern Med, 1999.)

"Helminth (parasitic worm) "load" is correlated to HIV plasma Viral Load, and successful deworming is associated with a significant decrease in HIV plasma Viral Load." (Treatment of intestinal worms is associated with decreased HIV plasma viral load. J.AIDS, September, 2002)

AIDS in Africa is and has always been a clinical diagnosis. Essentially, the test is dispensed with and "AIDS" is diagnosed based on the symptoms of hunger, TB and malaria - in other words, poverty:

"Our attention is now focused on the considerably large number of the seronegative group (135/227, 59%) who were clinically diagnosed as having AIDS. All the patients had three major signs: weight loss, prolonged diarrhoea, and chronic fever. Many of them also had other AIDS-associated signs, such as lymphadenopathy, tuberculosis, dermatological diseases, and neurological disorders." (Hishida O et al. Clinically diagnosed AIDS cases without evident association with HIV type 1 and 2 infections in Ghana Lancet. 1992 Oct 17).

The numbers that have been reported are also entirely fabricated based on exponential projections from one small group to entire populations. Very recently, these numbers have been revised to such a massive degree so as to drive the AIDS prognosticators to painful public redaction: In Swaziland this year, the rate of HIV infection among young women decreased remarkably, from 32.5 to 6 percent. A drop of 81% - overnight. UNICEF's Swaziland representative, Dr. Alan Brody, told the press "The problems is that all the sero-surveillance data came from pregnant women, and estimates for other demographics was based on that." (August, 2004, IRIN News)

Who are the tests considered "accurate" for? The tests are only considered to be "accurate" for certain groups. Those considered to be at "high risk" are much more likely to be tested, and to have their tests interpreted as either a "true positive," or, as you can see below, a "false negative." In other words, if they want you for the "AIDS" diagnosis, they'll get you:

"Suppose, for example, a single rapid test that has 99.4% specificity is administered to 1,000 people, meaning six will test false-positive. That error rate won't matter much in areas with a high prevalence of HIV, because in all probability the people testing false-positive will have the disease...

"But if the same test was performed on 1,000 white, affluent suburban housewives - a low-prevalence population - in all likelihood all positive results will be false, and positive predictive values plummet to zero. (Coming to Your Clinic - Candidates for Rapid Tests. AIDS Alert, 1998)

Here, from the Independent, is the new philosophy of AIDS, and it's quite a shift: "Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognized that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients."

So how did we get to, "It's only gay men, Africans, drug addicts and prostitutes," from the version advertised for 25 years: "Everyone is at equal risk to contract HIV and to develop AIDS."

What happened to the theory of sexual transmission?

The 10-year 1997 study by Dr. Nancy Padian had a lot to do with its downfall. The study took 175 "mixed" heterosexual couples (that is, one partner testing "positive" and one "negative") who practiced vaginal and anal sex [for the latter - 37.9% at the commencement of the study, decreasing to 8.1% by the end], both with and without condoms [32.2% condom use at the beginning, increasing to 74% at the end]. But no matter how these folks did it, nobody who was negative became positive:

"We followed up 175 HIV-discordant couples [one partner tests positive, one negative] over time, for a total of approximately 282 couple-years of follow up... No transmission [of HIV] occurred among the 25% of couples who did not use their condoms consistently, nor among the 47 couples who intermittently practiced unsafe sex during the entire duration of follow-up...We observed no seroconversions after entry into the study [nobody became HIV positive]...This evidence argues for low infectivity in the absence of either needle sharing and/or other cofactors.""

Padian determined that outside of intravenous drug use, this was not a very transmissible "sexually-transmissible disease." But there is a contention made by Dr. de Cock that some sort of special sexual activity in Sub-Saharan Africa must (but is not evidenced to) explain the differences in "HIV prevalence." It's worth looking at studies of sex and "HIV positivity" for comparison. Does sex correlate with "HIV positivity" more than I.V. drug addiction?

In West Africa, these women, all prostitutes, have remained negative for more than five years:

"[This study involved] a group of repeatedly exposed but persistently seronegative female prostitutes in The Gambia, West Africa...have worked as prostitutes for more than five years, use condoms infrequently with clients and only rarely with their regular partners and have a high incidence of other sexually transmitted diseases" (Rowland-Jones S et al. HIV-specific cytotoxic T-cells in HIV-exposed but uninfected Gambian women. Nat Med. 1995 Jan)

In sum, lots of STDs, lots of exposure to HIV positive persons, and no HIV.

Here, as reported on PBS's "RX for Survival" (2005) a group of prostitutes refuses to get sick:

"In Nairobi, a group of prostitutes appear to have natural immunity against HIV...because they have an abnormally large number of killer T-cells." (New York Times, 2005. Author: ANITA GATES)

In this study in Tel Aviv, girl and boy prostitutes don't turn "positive," unless they're injection drug users:

"Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence was studied in an unselected group of 216 female and transsexual prostitutes ... All 128 females who did not admit to drug abuse were seronegative; 2 of the 52 females (3.8%) who admitted to intravenous drug abuse were seropositive. " (Modan B et al. Prevalence of HIV antibodies in transsexual and female prostitutes. Am J Public Health. 1992 Apr)

In Tijuana, among a group of hundreds of prostitutes, condoms were used by a slight majority, but then, they said, for less than half the time:

"In order to determine whether prostitutes operating outside of areas of high drug abuse have equally elevated rates of infection, 354 prostitutes were surveyed in Tijuana, Mexico... None of the 354 [blood] samples...was positive for HIV-1 or HIV-2. Condoms were used by 59% of prostitutes but for less than half of their sexual contacts. ... Infection with HIV was not found in this prostitute population despite the close proximity to neighboring San Diego, CA, which has a high incidence of diagnosed cases of AIDS, and to Los Angeles, which has a reported 4% prevalence of HIV infection in prostitutes." (Hyams KC et al. HIV infection in a non-drug abusing prostitute population. Scand J Infect Dis. 1989)

No condoms, no drug use - zero positivity. The same is found in the US and throughout Europe. Injection drug use, not sex, equals "HIV positivity."

"HIV infection in non-drug using prostitutes tends to be low or absent, implying that sexual activity does not place them at high risk, while prostitutes who use intravenous drugs are far more likely to be infected with HIV. Other prostitute studies tend to be small but similarly emphasize the central role of drug use as a major risk factor: in New York City, 50 per cent of 12 drug users were positive, compared with 7 per cent of 65 nonusers; in Italy, 59 per cent of 22 drug users were positive, whereas none of the nonusers were. None of the 50 prostitutes tested in London, 56 in Paris, or 399 in Nuremberg were seropositive." (Rosenberg MJ, Weiner JM. Prostitutes and AIDS: a health department priority?. Am J Public Health. 1988 Apr)

That doesn't sound like much of an STD.

So, do you still believe the WHO, and the medical authorities when they talk about AIDS? Despite their incredible, world-changing lies and deceptions, advertising campaigns and persecution of dissenting scientists, do you still believe them when they say that AIDS is still a sex-disease, but now, only if you're Black, gay or poor?

// posted by James DeMeo @ Thursday, June 26, 2008