The Toronto-based Globe & Mail doesn't post too many of the letters that I send. Too radical I suppose. I should take it as a compliment.

Here's the latest "too hot to handle", in response to a historian chastising the 'left' for not supporting the liberation of women in Afghanistan, liberation at the end of a NATO gun barrel...

Dear Editors

People opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be naive and idealistic at times, but we're not naive enough to believe that the war in Afghanistan was started to eliminate a mysogynistic and theocratic regime by an American regime that itself has notable mysogynistic and theocratic tendencies.

I cannot believe that Afghanistan would have been invaded without 9/11 or a similar provocation. The war was started as punishment for harbouring Bin Laden. Morals and ethics just made a good cover.

Imagine that Canada was invaded by a foreign power because of one of our moral failings, perhaps our disgraceful treatment of the environment. After the invaders slaughtered our government (because they refused to reform overnight) does anyone really think that Canadians would then welcome the 'rebuilding' of their shattered country especially if it was focussed on hunting down and killing the remnants of the current government (elected by only a minority of the population)? Even the NDP and Greens would surely be aghast.

For all their many failings the Taliban at least brought some measure of stability to their country. It might be naive for me to have hoped that the regime would have moderated over time as the stability allowed Afghanis to focus on higher values than mere survival, but it is twice as naive to believe that democracy and gender equality can be imposed by tanks, bombs and guns on a country where now, once again, mere survival has become the number one priority and the foreign armies are increasingly seen as foot soldiers of the American empire.

- David Crowe

Nick Bennett has a blog which he uses to bash people like me who question the association between HIV and AIDS:
aidsmyth.blogspot.com

In it he claims that “I have never recieved [sic] funding from any pharmaceutical company that makes HIV antivirals.”

When I emailed and asked him about this he acknowledged that he had actually taken substantial sums of money from pharmaceutical companies, in the form of a subsidy covering his PhD studies. But this was from AstraZeneca, a company that does not make “HIV antivirals”.

People should know this. Does it bias his comments about the HIV/AIDS paradigm and the people who criticize it?

This blog will mainly discuss my interest in HIV/AIDS, other supposedly infectious diseases (that really aren't) and various aspects of modern 'industrial' medicine.

Websites created by me that discuss these issues are:

Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society
David Crowe’s Personal Website
Justice for Eliza Jane Scovill (and her parents)
My book project - The Infectious Myth

AIDS Deaths in Africa

No, Parket Mitchell and George Roter, it is not universally agreed that 40,000 people in Africa die of AIDS every week! Even the estimates (not actual numbers) of WHO/UNAIDS are only about one-fifth of that. [from: WHO/UNAIDS - AIDS Epidemic Update: December 2004]

But the bigger question is: What is AIDS in Africa? Few people seem to know, or care, or realize the significance of it being a completely different condition than in richer countries. No HIV test is generally performed. Instead, three of these four symptoms -- persistent cough, fever, diarrhea, weight loss (>10% of weight) -- get you an AIDS diagnosis (according to WHO's 'Bangui' definition). Does this sound like malaria, TB or the effects of malnutrition to you?

But the nice thing, from the point of view of multinational drug companies, is that people are falling over themselves to spend money on antiretroviral drugs. These people not only don't know what AIDS really is, but they must have no clue about the serious, often fatal, side effects of these drugs. Only by concluding that everyone with fever, cough, diarrhea and weight loss is going to die could such toxic compounds be prescribed.

Many people taking AIDS drugs in North America become dependent on blood transfusions to live because severe anemia is a common side effect. Anemia is already a huge problem in Africa and transfusions or exotic drugs to counter it are not common.

So, send your money to the Tsunami victims, or to old-fashioned third world development, don't send it to AIDS charities unless you know what AIDS is and unless you're comfortable with the toxicity profile of the drugs.

Risk of AIDS From Needle Pricks

The risk of AIDS via needle prick injuries was exaggerated by Andre⁄ Picard ("A tiny pinprick, a deadly outcome" December 1, 2003, page A1,A6). According to Health Canada, there have only been 6 cases of AIDS due to occupational exposure in Canada over a time where there have probably been well over one million needle prick injuries.[1] Limited information has been published, but in the first case, an elderly woman, the conclusion was drawn not from positive evidence, but by the elimination of all other possible explanations. The possibility of false positive test results was not considered.

In the United States, with almost a million AIDS cases diagnosed, the CDC no longer bothers to report the number of health care workers with documented transmission of HIV (let alone AIDS).[2] Up to 1997, the last year this information was reported, only 25 cases of AIDS out of 633,000  had been blamed on documented occupational transmission. There was not a single case among paramedics and surgeons, two groups most likely to have uncontrolled exposures to HIV-positive blood.

Health care workers who are exposed to blood that is suspected to be HIV-positive are treated with drugs that have potentially fatal consequences. One US health care worker had a life-threatening allergic reaction,[4] and another required a liver transplant after post-exposure prophylaxis, for example.[5]

The case of Brenda Tippett, and others like it, are certainly unfortunate, but she may well be suffering from drug-induced injury, not from HIV and Hepatitis C.


References:
[1] HIV and AIDS in Canada: Surveillance report to December 31, 2002. Health Canada. 2003 Apr.

[2] HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report; U.S. HIV and AIDS cases reported through December 2001. CDC. 2002; 13(2).

[3] HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report (through December 1997). CDC. 1998; 9(2).

[4] Johnson S et al. Adverse Effects Associated With Use of Nevirapine in HIV Postexposure Prophylaxis for 2 Health Care Workers [first case]. JAMA. 2000 Dec 6.

[5] Sha BE et al. Adverse Effects Associated With Use of Nevirapine in HIV Postexposure Prophylaxis for 2 Health Care Workers [second case]. JAMA. 2000 Dec 6; 284(21): 2723.

Questions that should have been asked (and answered) about SARS before we panicked…

(Unpublished letter to the Globe and Mail)

Questions that should  have been asked (and answered) about SARS before we panicked:

• Do relatively vague symptoms (high temperature, plus one of a number of respiratory symptoms, including cough) necessarily indicate a single pathogen?
• How were environmental causes or co-factors eliminated from consideration?
• Why do "SARS" symptoms in a person with no known direct or indirect contact with someone from Southeast Asia not result in a diagnosis of SARS?
• Have people recently arrived from the far east never come down with these symptoms shortly  after arriving in Canada before?
• Were extra 'potent' pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, prescribed once it was feared that a new pathogen was present?
• How can a test be known to be reliable when the pathogen that it is testing for is still unknown?
• Why have the media not asked these questions (or at least not published them, with corresponding answers, anywhere)?

Are we in fact witnessing an artificial phenomenon, where public health officials have realized that under-reacting to a potential threat is career suicide, yet over-reacting to a threat has minimal consequences, and might even make them look heroic?

Reference: SARS Case Definition

-- 

David Crowe