Les Jones

Science > Rian Malan on the Exaggerated African AIDS Epidemic

In "Africa Isn't Dying of AIDS" Rian Malan reviews the pitiful history of lies and exaggerations surrounding AIDS in Africa. Read this along with Michael Crichton's essay below to see what happens when you mix science, politics, and meaningless data models. Via Colby Cosh.

Aids is the most political disease ever. We have been fighting about it since the day it was identified. The key battleground is public perception, and the most deadly weapon is the estimate. When the virus first emerged, I was living in America, where HIV incidence was estimated to be doubling every year or so. Every time I turned on the TV, Madonna popped up to warn me that ‘Aids is an equal-opportunity killer’, poised to break out of the drug and gay subcultures and slaughter heterosexuals. In 1985, a science journal estimated that 1.7 million Americans were already infected, with ‘three to five million’ soon likely to follow suit. Oprah Winfrey told the nation that by 1990 ‘one in five heterosexuals will be dead of Aids’.

Why would UNAIDS and its massive alliance of pharmaceutical companies, NGOs, scientists and charities insist that the epidemic is worsening if it isn’t? A possible explanation comes from New York physician Joe Sonnabend, one of the pioneers of Aids research. Sonnabend was working in a New York clap clinic when the syndrome first appeared, and went on to found the American Foundation for Aids Research, only to quit in protest when colleagues started exaggerating the threat of a generalised pandemic with a view to increasing Aids’ visibility and adding urgency to their grant applications. The Aids establishment, says Sonnabend, is extremely skilled at ‘the manipulation of fear for advancement in terms of money and power’.

With such thoughts in the back of my mind, South Africa’s Aids Day ‘celebrations’ cast me into a deeply leprous mood. Please don’t get me wrong here. I believe that Aids is a real problem in Africa. Governments and sober medical professionals should be heeded when they express deep concerns about it. But there are breeds of Aids activist and Aids journalist who sound hysterical to me. On Aids Day, they came forth like loonies drawn by a full moon, chanting that Aids was getting worse and worse, ‘spinning out of control’, crippling economies, causing famines, killing millions, contributing to the oppression of women, and ‘undermining democracy’ by sapping the will of the poor to resist dictators.

To hear them talk, Aids is the only problem in Africa, and the only solution is to continue the agitprop until free access to Aids drugs is defined as a ‘basic human right’ for everyone. They are saying, in effect, that because Mr Mhlangu of rural Zambia has a disease they find more compelling than any other, someone must spend upwards of $400 a year to provide Mr Mhlangu with life-extending Aids medication — a noble idea, on its face, but completely demented when you consider that Mr Mhlangu’s neighbours are likely to be dying in much larger numbers of diseases that could be cured for a few cents if medicines were only available. About 350 million Africans — nearly half the population — get malaria every year, but malaria medication is not a basic human right. Two million get TB, but last time I checked, spending on Aids research exceeded spending on TB by a crushing factor of 90 to one. As for pneumonia, cancer, dysentery or diabetes, let them take aspirin, or grub in the bush for medicinal herbs.