NotAIDS! Opinion
March 22, 2008

A comment on the press release, Poor Sanitation Threatens Public Health by the UN and WHO

Over the last two years, NotAIDS! has featured numerous articles on the twin health problems whose parent is poverty, malnutrition and sanitation.

The lack of adequate caloric and nutritional intake, and the basic lack of potable, parasite-free drinking water because of insufficient sanitation systems in Africa and in other areas of the world, such as India, China, and many developing nations, has more to do with immune deficiency everywhere than an engima called HIV.

Indeed, NotAIDS! has published vitriolic opinions against the policies and diatribe of the United Nations (UNAIDS, UN Health) and the World Health Organization (WHO) for their dogged misplacement of financial and political support of the behemoth that is the AIDS industry.

In editorial fairness, the wisdom in the press release republished here is lauded. Hopefully it signals a shift toward common sense dictating policy rather than meddling into people's sex lives or trying to circumsise the African continent.  read more »

Joint News Release WHO/UNICEF

Poor sanitation threatens public health

6 in 10 Africans remain without access to proper toilet

20 MARCH 2008 | GENEVA --

Sixty-two per cent of Africans do not have access to an improved sanitation facility -- a proper toilet -- which separates human waste from human contact, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation.

A global report will be published later this year, however, preliminary data on the situation in Africa was released today as part of World Water Day 2008.

The Day, built around the theme that “Sanitation matters," seeks to draw attention to the plight of some 2.6 billion people around the world who live without access to a toilet at home and thus are vulnerable to a range of health risks.

"Sanitation is a cornerstone of public health," said WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. "Improved sanitation contributes enormously to human health and well-being, especially for girls and women. We know that simple, achievable interventions can reduce the risk of contracting diarrhoeal disease by a third."

Although WHO and UNICEF estimate that 1.2 billion people worldwide gained access to improved sanitation between 1990 and 2004, an estimated 2.6 billion people - including 980 million children – had no toilets at home.

If current trends continue, there will still be 2.4 billion people without basic sanitation in 2015, and the children among them will continue to pay the price in lost lives, missed schooling, in disease, malnutrition and poverty.  read more »

NotAIDS! News
February 17, 2007

False positive HIV tests can cause catastrophic trauma to a pregnant woman, leading to depression, suicide, elective abortion, or the unnecessary administration of highly toxic substances like AZT or Nevirapine to the newborn and/or mother.

Women in New Jersey have suffered a civil rights defeat in the State of New Jersey when the legislature recently passed a bill that forces each pregnant woman and her newborn to be tested for HIV.

Despite the fact that only two infants tested positive in 2006 in New Jersey, and none in 2007, the State opted to blast personal liberty and violate civil rights with a law that is both unncessary and cruel.

Women who are pregnant have a high "false positive" rate, and when specificity and accuracy are evaluated in the general population, all HIV tests are of questionable value.  read more »

NotAIDS! News
January 29, 2007

Clean drinking water, a luxury most of us take for granted, is sadly unavailable for a billion or so of our brothers and sisters around the world.

NotAIDS! has published various charts and editorials about the shameful lack of attention to the world's most solvable health problems.

Having enough food to eat isn't a question for most people of the West, many of whom are overweight, and a frightening majority of whom are obese.

But in developing nations, and amongst the lower income in the cities and towns of the rich West, malnutrition is shockingly common.

In a surprising shift towards common sense, some important voices are joining the call to correct these gross imbalances.

The Associated Press recently published an article by Maria Cheng, "Experts Call for Rethinking AIDS Money." She quotes some of the statistics NotAIDS! has graphically represented over the past two years, data which has been available for some time, but for some reason until now hasn't been sexy enough for the likes of celebrity ambassadors such as the always-sunglassed Bono.

As the charts show, easily curable conditions cause the most premature deaths, like parasites in untreated drinking water, or malnutrition.

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of Lancet, a British medical journal, had this to say, "We have a system in public health where the loudest voice gets the most money. AIDS has grossly distorted our limited budget."  read more »

NotAIDS! Excerpt
December 14, 2007

From the preface to The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory by Henry Bauer

An alien observer might well by puzzled over the discrepancy between the actual facts about HIV and AIDS and the conventional wisdom about them.

For instance, the accepted view incessantly urges "safe sex", particularly the use of condoms, on the grounds that HIV/AIDS is sexually transmitted.

In point of fact, however, [studies of condom use indicate that it makes little] or no difference; and observations of actual sexual transmission find it negligibly small.

Unprotected heterosexual intercourse between an HIV-positive partner and an HIV-negative one results in the latter seroconverting – becoming positive – only about 1 time in 1,000, according to studies not only in the United States, but also in Thailand, Haiti, and Africa, where, according to official pronouncements, heterosexual intercourse is the chief mode by which HIV is supposed to spread.

These studies (cited in Chapter 2) are all in respected and freely available scientific periodicals. Like all such articles, they are indexed, so most of them will immediately turn up in any search for information about sexual transmission of HIV.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Editor's note: Condoms do provide protection from common sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and gonorrhea.
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A second instance is the press release of June 2005 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announcing that "for the first time" the number of HIV-positive Americans had passed the million mark (CDC 2005). Equally authoritative estimates, most of them from the CDC itself, had estimated about 1 million Americans as being HIV-positive ever since testing began: "In 1986...between 1 and 1.5 million persons were infected" (MMWR 1987a).

In 1987 (MMWR 1987b), "The estimate obtained by incorporating these revision into the 1986 calculation... – 945,000 to 1.41 million – differs little from the earlier figure."

"In mid-1988 it was estimated that 1.5-2 million Americans had been infected," according to Donald Francis, AIDS Adviser, California Department of Health Services, and Richard Kaslow, Chief of Epidemiology and Biometry, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Kaslow & Francis 1989, 93).

In 1989, "Currently about 1 million persons in the United States are infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)" (CDC 1989).

For 1993, in a policy forum in Science it was estimated that greater than 1 million in North America were HIV-positive (Merson 1993, fig. 1).

"In 2003, more than 1 million persons in the United States were estimated to be living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection" (Glynn & Rhodes 2005).

There is no basis in fact for saying, in 2005, "for the first time".

Looking further into the sequence of events, the alien observer might note that Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the original "signature" diseases of AIDS, is now known not to be caused by HIV. Yet this accepted fact has not inspired widespread questions about how HIV and AIDS are connected, or whether they are connected at all.  read more »

NotAIDS! Commentary
December 3, 2007

"Affirmation"

It is with continual and sad regret (bafflement?) that I continue to read and identify with this author's (and others!) obvious and clear conclusions of the negative, counter-intuitive, yet assumedly standard and AIDS INC. blessed mass med-taking of today and it's inevitable and obvious unhealthful effects (and that is direct effects, not just "side effects").

For those of us -- even us who have been mocked, as I have (as I can barely change a light bulb)-- for having very little every day common sense but who nevertheless collectively came to the very real and most common sense decision of our lives (viewing and refusing meds with a healthy suspicion) the reward has been wryly bittersweet.

I refer to the rearview validation of watching sadly as our med-striken (and so medically "correct" and "sensible") brethren swell, grey, gasp, vein, shrink, shit (leaking in spite of their depends) eat without appetite, sit with apathy, live with compromised enthusiasm and who drift from one lab test to another in search of the rainbow chasing holy grail of "undetectable viral load" - a pharmaceutical marketing tool if there ever was one -- and I am left to shrug and ponder at the shame and scope of this mercenary hypocrisy.  read more »

Editor's note: Confirmed by current news reports of UNAIDS' admission that AIDS numbers have been overestimated by around 7 million, particularly in Asia, NotAIDS! is proud to have focused on this issue. Here is an excerpt of one such report, originally published in BMC Medicine, uncovering UNAIDS' gross exaggeration, ahead of the New York Times by a full year.
- The Editor, November 27, 2007

NotAIDS! News

Published in BMC Medicine, 13 December 2006
Contact: Juliette Savin
By Lalit Dandona, Vemu Lakshmi, Talasila Sudha, G Anil Kumar and Rakhi Dandona
.
Official figures might overestimate the number of HIV-positive individuals in India.

A new study published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine finds that the HIV burden is 2.5 times lower than official figures predict in the district of Guntur, in the south-Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Andhra Pradesh has the highest HIV prevalence in India according to official estimates.

Lalit Dandona and colleagues from the Administrative Staff College of India collaborated with colleagues from the Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, India, to estimate the number of HIV-positive individuals in the district of Guntur.

Dandona et al. collected blood samples from 12,617 individuals who were representative of the population of Guntur.  read more »