i was just reading about kofi annan, who had given a press conference about aids and how new funding needs to be made available to combat it. of course aids needs to be combatted, but the strange thing is that people are approaching hiv/aids as if it’s a conventional malady, like the common cold.
in my limited dilletantish research regarding hiv/aids i have come to the following conclusion: -within the scientific community there is no universally accepted definition/understanding of what hiv/aids actually is- some aids researchers believe that hiv/aids is a blood borne pathogen that attacks and compromises the immune system. some aids researchers believe that hiv/aids is a bizarre virus that has no conventional ‘footprints’ and is bizarrely selective in who it infects. some aids researchers actually believe that hiv/aids doesn’t exist, and that people who are supposedly dying of aids are actually dying of a whole host of other immuno-suppressed syndromes.
me, personally, i’m not a scientist, so i have no idea. but i do see a lot of strange things surrounding hiv/aids. i read a report from some aids researchers who had been to sub-saharan africa to study the disease. they came back confused. in a lot of places in sub-saharan africa they say that anyone who has died of a wasting (i.e-makes you skinny) disease was said to have died of aids. so if someone dies from malaria or intestinal parasites people say that he died of aids. i don’t know if this is true, but it would certainly help to explain these supposed 40% infection rates. like i said, i’m not a scientist, so i don’t know. and i do have to ask myself one question based on my own empirical understanding of the disease in the western world? that question is: where’s the western heterosexual epidemic? when the disease was first supposedly identified in the 80’s there were predictions of a massive epidemic, wherein 10% of the general population would die of aids. personally i don’t know a single heterosexual person who’s died of aids, and i live in new york city, which was supposed to be ground zero for the disease. and it’s not as if every person in nyc (and the rest of the west) is living a risk free lives. i know people who’ve engaged in absurdly risky behaviour, and they don’t have the disease.
which makes me wonder: what’s going on? i’ve spoken to some doctors who maintain that they don’t know of a single case of a man contracting hiv from heterosexual contact. if that’s true that’s very odd, don’t you agree? and the weird thing is that if i look around me, that’s what i see. the ‘straight man’ aids epidemic never happened. again, i’m just raising questions, i’m certainly not coming to conclusions. i have some friends who maintain that the test for hiv antibodies is way too broad, and that it yields a lot of false positives. and then when someone tests positive for hiv (mistakenly) they’re given extremely toxic drugs, and that the toxic drugs actually kill them. one thing that there is consensus about in the scientific community is that azt and a lot of the ‘aids drugs’ are really, really toxic(and possibly life saving too, who knows?).
so my conclusion is that i don’t know. but it does seem statistically inconsistent that a disease that hasn’t really touched the heterosexual community in the west would ravage 40% of that same community in sub-saharan africa. isn’t that statistically impossible? if a disease exists and is contagious and deadly wouldn’t it exist and be contagious and deadly for everyone regardless of where they live? people have unprotected sex everywhere. i don’t know. all i do know is that the hiv/aids issue is probably a lot more complicated than most people assume.
and with this update i’m not trying to be inflammatory, i’m just pointing out some aspects of this disease that raise a lot of questions for me. even though there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the nature of the disease, i do, of course, strongly believe that all people should practice safe sex