The leader of an United States movement challenging conventional science on HIV/Aids is being investigated for child endangerment after her three-year-old daughter died of the disease.
Christine Maggiore, the child’s HIV-positive mother, denies HIV leads to Aids and refused to take anti-retroviral drugs during pregnancy. She breastfed her daughter, Eliza Jane, and refused to have her tested for the virus.
Four months after the toddler’s death, Maggiore and her husband, Robin Scovill, are challenging the coroner’s finding that she died from HIV/Aids-related pneumonia. Maggiore told the Los Angeles Times she had no regrets.
”Would I redo anything based on what happened? I don’t think I would. I think I acted with the best information and the best of intentions with all my heart,” she said in an interview published on Sunday.
The newspaper reported that the Los Angeles police were investigating the couple for endangering their daughter’s life, and the local social services were considering whether the couple should be forced to test their eight-year-old son, Charlie.
Maggiore was diagnosed with HIV in 1992, but has not shown symptoms of Aids. She began to question the scientific link between the virus and the disease, and wrote a book entitled What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Aids Was Wrong? The book made her a minor celebrity.
She launched an organisation, Alive and Well Aids Alternatives, to promote her ideas, met the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, who is also a sceptic, and appeared on primetime television talkshows.
She told ABC News that she refused to take antiviral drugs despite substantial evidence that they dramatically reduced the risk of the mother transferring the virus to her child because ”I did not want to expose my growing child to toxins during pregnancy”.
Jay Gordon, a Santa Monica paediatrician who treated Eliza Jane, said he regretted not testing for HIV when he examined her for an apparent ear infection 11 days before her death.
”It’s possible that the whole situation could have been changed if one of the doctors involved — one of the three doctors involved — had intervened,” Dr Gordon, told the LA Times. ”Do I think I’m blameless in this? No, I’m not blameless.” – Guardian Unlimited Â