Anita Allen
The idea that a virus, HIV, causes Aids remains merely a hypothesis until it is proven true. There is, as yet, no such proof. Moreover, HIV tests are non- specific and tend to cross-react, yielding false positives.
The definition of the syndrome (the “s” in Aids) has been changed over the years. Originally, a few uncommon and rare illnesses, such as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma (a type of cancer) were classified under the syndrome.
Now, however, more than 30 diseases, none of them new to the people of Africa, have been so classified. If you test HIV- positive, and have any of these diseases, say tuberculosis, then you are said to have Aids. If you test HIV-negative, then you are said to have tuberculosis.
In Africa if you present yourself at a clinic with a cough, or fever, or chronic diarrhoea, or weight loss, you may not be tested at all and still be classified as having Aids – and you could be sent home without treatment.
All of these conditions can be far better explained on a continent where half the people do not have access to drinkable water, adequate food or shelter and public health systems – a continent which, moreover, harbours a range of tropical diseases, parasites and other microbes unknown in colder climates.
African sexuality is said to explain the spread of HIV/Aids in Africa. Like it or not, sexual transmission of HIV is no more than anecdotal. So, too, is the view that health care workers are infected through needle injuries. As it stands, there is not a single published paper demonstrating either of these propositions. But several papers indicate that sexual transmission of HIV, if indeed it exists, is improbable.
It is precisely because there is no clarity about what is meant by HIV or Aids that they are lumped together as one thing – and used interchangeably. If one has HIV, then one is said to have Aids, and vice versa.
The problem, however, is that many HIV- positive people remain perfectly healthy. This would, ordinarily, be considered a falsification of the HIV/Aids hypothesis. Instead, however, it merely led to the hypothesis being amended to incorporate the suggestion that the virus could have a period of latency of 30 years or more.
If at any stage an HIV-positive person dies of some ailment, then they are said to have died of Aids. Many people who have Aids-indicator diseases are, however, HIV-negative. Some sero-convert to HIV-positive months after being diagnosed with Aids. In that case, effect has preceded cause. How can that be? Others diagnosed with Aids have remained HIV-negative to the end. So, we have the effect, but the proposed cause is entirely absent.
In the United States, in the early 1980s, modelling of viral infections predicted rampant spread of HIV and Aids to heterosexuals. But this did not occur. Apparently HIV is able to distinguish not only sex but sexual inclination.
So the definition of Aids was changed to include more indicator diseases. When anomalies appeared, however, especially in Africa, where HIV infection is estimated to be evenly distributed between males and females, unlike in the US where it is mainly among males, the definition was changed again. So HIV can also apparently distinguish which continent one is on.
The conclusion is unavoidable: however varied and complicated the observed conditions, HIV/Aids proponents are determined to explain them on the basis of the interaction of the causal virus. If the preconditions don’t work, they change the definition, and make the Aids net larger. If no two experiments show the identical virus, this is said to be because it mutates too quickly. New factors are always shoe-horned into the point where there is virtually no disease to which HIV cannot be causally linked.
South Africa needs open and vigorous debate on these issues.
Anita Allen is a freelance science journalist