As I said, J2 - mix with your own kind but I reserve the right tect my
bloodline and family....and be sure I am proud of my blodline and
heritage and pedigree.
OSaba
AIDS in Africa
BODY: THE POSTER is seen in Kenya.
Below a lurid picture of a worm wriggling through a human heart, the
caption reads: "Careless sex is a fruit with a worm in it. AIDS."
At the 10th International AIDS Conference in Yokohama in August, Dr.
Yuichi Shiokawa put the sentiment in a different way. The African AIDS
epidemic, he said, could be brought under control only if Africans
restrained their sexual cravings. But Professor Nathan Clumeck of the
Universite Libre in Brussels is skeptical that Africans will ever do so.
In a recent interview with Le Monde, Clumeck claimed that "sex, love and
disease do not mean the same thing to Africans as they do to West
Europeans because the notion of guilt doesn't exist in the same way as
it does in the Judeo-Christian culture of the West." Such myths about
the sexual excesses of Africans are old ones. Early European travelers
returned from Africa bringing tales of black men allegedly performing
carnal athletic feats with black women who were themselves sexually
insatiable. The affront to Victorian sensibilities was cited alongside
tribal conflicts and other "uncivilized" behavior to justify the need
for colonial social control.
Today, AIDS researchers have added new, undocumented twists to an old
repertoire: stories of Zairians who rub monkey's blood into cuts as an
aphrodisiac; claims that ulcerated genitals are becoming widespread; and
urban folklore about philandering East African truck drivers who get HIV
from prostitutes and then infect their wives.
The World Health Organization claims that 10 million HIV- positive
Africans are responsible for 300,000 cases of AIDS reported since 1981.
On the face of it this seems to be a catastrophe. Unlike in developed
countries, where over 90 percent of AIDS cases are homosexual males,
intravenous drug users and blood transfusion recipients, African AIDS is
supposedly suffered by men and women in equal numbers who contract it,
presumably from heterosexual intercourse. The African figures are often
cited by the AIDS establishment and safe sex activists in Europe and the
United States to prove that "everyone" is at risk.
BUT INCREASINGLY, discrepancies about the dynamics of HIV transmission,
skepticism about what really causes AIDS and mounting evidence of
imprecise medical diagnoses are stirring up a backlash among African
scientists. They argue that in Africa AIDS is not a contagious epidemic
linked to sexual habits but is the new name for old diseases that result
from inadequate health care, widespread malnutrition, endemic infections
and unsanitary water supplies. Dr. Richard Chirimuuta of Zimbabwe notes
sarcastically that in order to have one-third of the sexually active
adults in some central and east African countries infected with AIDS,
"life in these countries must be one endless orgy."
A growing number of African physicians including Dr. Mark Mattah
(Midland Center for Neurology in England), Dr. Sam Okware (former
director of AIDS research in Uganda) and Dr. P.A.K. Addy (director of
clinical microbiology in Kumasi, Ghana) say they think the panic over
the heterosexual transmission of AIDS may be a hoax. Dr. Felix
Konotey-Ahulu, a Ghanaian physician at London's Cromwell Hospital,
toured Africa countries a few years ago to assess the "epidemic." In a
scathing report for Lancet, Dr. Konotey-Ahulu asked, "If tens of
thousands are dying from AIDS (and Africans do not cremate their dead),
where are the graves?"
Some Western scientists, including Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French
virologist who discovered HIV, claim that the practice of female
circumcision facilitates the spread of AIDS. How do they explain the
fact that Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Sudan, where female
circumcision is the most widespread, are among the countries with the
lowest incidence of AIDS?
In fact, there is little evidence to support Western perceptions of
African sexual promiscuity. Widespread modesty codes for women, whose
sexuality is considered a gift to be used for procreation, make many
African societies seem chaste compared to the West. The Somalis, Afars,
Oromos and Amharas of northeast Africa think that public displays of
sexual feelings demean a woman's "gift," so that sexual contacts are
restricted to ceremonial touching or dancing. Initial sexual
relationships are geared to the beginnings of making a family. The
notion of "boyfriends" and "girlfriends," virtually universal in the
West, has no parallel in most traditional African cultures.
No one has ever shown that people in Rwanda, Uganda, Zaire and Kenya --
the so-called "AIDS belt" -- are more active sexually than people in
Nigeria, which has reported only 722 AIDS cases out of a population of
100 million, or Cameroon, which reported 2,870 cases in 20 million.
Scientists dismiss the notion that males from any continent or region
are more addicted to sex than those from another because testosterone
levels, the measure of sexual vigor in men, never vary more than a tiny
fraction of a percent anywhere in the world.
IN 1991, researchers from the French group Medicins Sans Frontieres and
the Harvard School of Public Health conducted a survey of sexual
behavior in the Moyo district of northwest Uganda. Their findings
revealed behavior that was not very different from that of the West. On
average, women had their first sex at age 17, men at 19. Eighteen
percent of women and 50 percent of men reported premarital sex; 1.6
percent of the women and 4.1 percent of the men had casual sex in the
month preceding the study, while 2 percent of women and 15 percent of
men did so in the preceding year.
No national sex surveys have ever been carried out in Africa, yet AIDS
researchers blithely assume that heterosexual HIV transmission in Africa
parallels the dynamics for HIV among homosexual men in the West. There
is no scientific basis for this. Because female-to-male transmission of
HIV is extremely difficult, AIDS has never "exploded" into the
heterosexual populations of the U.S. and Europe, even though condom-less
sex remains the norm.
>From 1985 to 1991, Dr. Nancy Padian and her associates studied 72
HIV-negative male partners of HIV-infected women. As reported in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (1991), they found only "one
probable instance" of female-to-male transmission. As for sexual
transmission in general, a definitive study in the British Medical
Journal (1989) by the European Study Group on AIDS concluded that the
only sexual practice leading to an increased risk of HIV infection for
men or women was receptive anal intercourse.
Even the definition of AIDS differs from one continent to another. In
Europe and America, AIDS-defining diseases include 29 unrelated maladies
ranging from pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and pulmonary tuberculosis
to cervical cancer. In addition, an HIV-positive test and a T-cell count
below 200 are necessary for a confirmed diagnosis.
But in Africa, the term "AIDS" is used to describe symptoms associated
with a number of previously known diseases. In the mid-1980s, those
common diseases were suddenly reclassified as "special opportunistic
AIDS-related infections" and Africans were warned to change their sexual
practices through abstinence, monogamy and condoms -- or they would die.
Hilarie Standing, a British medical anthropologist and AIDS researcher,
concedes that African "risk populations are assumed rather than
revealed." So why are AIDS cases in Africa nearly evenly divided between
men and women? The answer lies in the World Health Organization's
definition of "AIDS" in Africa which differs decisively from AIDS in the
West. The WHO's clinical-case definition for AIDS in Africa (adopted in
1985) is not based on an HIV test or T-cell counts but on the combined
symptoms of chronic diarrhea, prolonged fever, 10 percent body weight
loss in two months and a persistent cough, none of which are new or
uncommon on the African continent.
HIV TESTS are notoriously unreliable in Africa. A 1994 study in the
Journal of Infectious Diseases concluded that HIV tests were useless in
central Africa, where the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, malaria
and leprosy were so prevalent that they registered over 70 percent false
positive results.
Furthermore, everything we know about viruses tells us that they are
equal opportunity microbes. They will attack men and women weakened by
malnutrition, the most effective cause of immune suppression. Venereal
diseases left untreated can also impair one's immunity, rendering any
victim susceptible to other infections. Africans are often assumed to
die from "AIDS-like" symptoms after their immune systems have been
weakened by malaria, tuberculosis, cholera or parasitic diseases.
By calling these deaths "AIDS" and claiming there is a new epidemic in
Africa, are health officials from the West, perhaps unwittingly, helping
to provide opportunities for development agencies, biomedical
researchers and pharmaceutical companies who clamor for more money and
markets? Certainly, promulgating the idea that AIDS is an epidemic
caused by sexual promiscuity will deepen Africa's dependency on Western
aid for diagnostic tests, high-tech sterilization equipment and medical
personnel.
Another consequence of having millions of Africans threatened by AIDS
may be to make it politically acceptable to use the continent as a
laboratory for vaccine trials and the distribution of toxic, anti-HIV
drugs like AZT. Vaccine experiments in the United States have been
curtailed due to government regulations and fear of lawsuits from
research-related injuries. However, according to a 1994 Rockefeller
Foundation report, "Accelerating Preventive HIV Vaccines for the World,"
risky HIV vaccine trials would be tolerated -- even welcomed -- in
African countries.
Because of the extraordinary time lag between HIV infection and onset of
"AIDS" -- now set at six to 12 years -- AIDS activists warn that their
awareness campaign will require many years of active government
intervention and funding to overcome resistance to behavioral changes.
These new missionaries with their messages of safe sex seem especially
preoccupied with changing men's behavior. They want to turn African
women into "gatekeepers" who negotiate sexual relations and
risk-reduction strategies. At the Yokohama AIDS conference and the
recent U.N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, feminists
insisted that AIDS would be halted only when women were empowered to
reduce inequalities by creating "networks" that enhanced gender
sensitivity and prevented sexual victimization.
IT IS the political economy of underdevelopment, not sexual intercourse,
that is killing Africans. Poor harvests, rural poverty, migratory labor
systems, urban crowding, ecological degradation and the sadistic
violence of civil wars imperil and destroy far more African lives. When
essential services for water, power and transport break down, public
sanitation deteriorates and the risks of cholera and dysentery increase.
African poverty, not some extraordinary sexual behavior, is the best
predictor of AIDS-defining diseases.
AIDS skeptics should scrutinize ethnocentric stereotypes about African
sexuality and thoroughly reappraise the entire HIV=AIDS orthodoxy. The
purported link between HIV and AIDS was only hypothesized 10 years ago
but it has subsequently acquired a life of its own, especially among
fund raisers and sex educators who, like the theory, remain immune to
criticism.
Of course, people everywhere should be encouraged to behave more
thoughtfully in their sexual lives. They should be provided with
reliable counseling about condom use, contraception, family planning and
venereal diseases. But whether in Cameroon or California, sex education
must no longer be distorted by terrifying, dubious misinformation that
equates sex with death.
Sacramento Bee, October 30, 1994, FORUM; Pg. FO1
HEADLINE: MYTHS OF AIDS AND SEX
BYLINE: Charles L. Geshekter
Message-Id:
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 09:43:43 -0500
From: Faraz Fareed Rabbani
Subject: Fwd: *** ON AIDS IN AFRICA *** (fwd)
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