Denying HIV causes AIDS spells African disaster

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "HIV is the singular common factor that is shared between AIDS cases in gay men in San Francisco, well nourished young women in Uganda, hemophiliacs in Japan and children in Rumanian orphanages. To deny the role of HIV in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is deceptive."

So concluded Robin Weiss of University College London in the paper that he co-wrote with American colleague Harold Jaffe wrote in the scientific journal Nature in 1990. It was a profoundly influential article that comprehensively dismantled and destroyed the contention, advanced by dissident scientists like Peter Duesberg of the University of California Berkeley, that HIV does not cause AIDS.

That was 10 years ago. Duesberg's argument was long ago tracked to its lair, killed and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart, so why would we have it all over again now? Yet we are: as the 13th International AIDS Conference prepares to open in Durban, South Africa next Sunday, South African President Thabo Mbeki has convened an special international panel of experts to advise him on the Human Immuno- deficiency Virus and AIDS -- and invited numbers of people who deny the HIV-AIDS linkage to sit on it.

Peter Duesberg was there last week, and Eleni Papadopulos- Eleopulos of the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia (who doubts that there is even such a virus as HIV). The panel also includes prominent mainstream scientists like Luc Montaignier, the French scientist who discovered the HIV virus, and Ann Duerr of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, but Mbeki clearly wants an answer that casts doubt on the orthodoxy.

The anguish and outrage that Mbeki's search for an alternative answer causes among other professionals engaged in the battle against AIDS is so great that last week over 5,000 of the world's leading scientists and doctors from 80 countries, including a dozen Nobel Prize winners, signed an open declaration affirming that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

What drives them to this unprecedented action is the fear that not just South Africa, but many other desperate African countries, will be seduced into futile policies that let millions die needlessly.

"The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV is clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous, meeting the highest standards of science," states the Durban Declaration. "The data fulfill exactly the same criteria as for other viral diseases, such as polio, measles and smallpox. It is unfortunate that a few vocal people continue to deny the evidence. This position will cost countless lives."

Tough talk, but Mbeki's replies are just as tough. In a recent letter to other heads of state, he complained of an "orchestrated campaign of condemnation" that was being carried out against dissenting scientists like Peter Duesberg, comparing the "silencing" of the dissidents (who are not the least bit silent) to apartheid, and suggesting that "in an earlier period of human history, these would be heretics burned at the stake!"

On Wednesday, Mbeki's spokesman responded to the Durban Declaration by saying that it belonged "among the dustbins" in the President's office. What on earth has driven all these normally cautious and measured people to use such harsh language?

The main reason is the speed and ferocity with which AIDS has struck southern Africa. It has long been clear that Africans, for some reason, are particularly vulnerable: of the estimated 34.3 million people now infected with HIV, over two-thirds live in sub-Saharan Africa (which only has one-tenth of the world's population). But it's now clear that southern Africa, from Zambia and Zimbabwe down to Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, is even more severely afflicted than the rest.

The HIV infection rate in central Africa, where the virus probably first moved from monkeys to human beings between forty and fifty years ago, has only climbed from five percent of the population in the mid-1980s to seven or eight percent today. In southern Africa, by contrast, the HIV infection rate was under one percent 15 years ago -- but it is around 30 or 40 percent today.

That means that between a third and a half of today's teenagers in these countries will probably die of AIDS, most of them in their 20s and 30s. It is this appalling prospect that makes people like Thabo Mbeki cling to the desperate speculation that the calamity sweeping their region is a different disease -- hopefully one that does not cost huge amounts of money to combat properly.

If a 32 percent HIV positive rate among pregnant women in KwaZulu-Natal today does not really mean that over a third of the province's population faces eventual death from AIDS, then you can go on working for South Africa's development without having to spend most of your budget on fighting the disease and its causes. That's why Mbeki wants to believe the dissenters -- but believing them probably means that millions of extra South Africans will die who might have been saved.

It is more likely that southern Africa has an especially virulent strain of the virus, or that this region's people have some particular genetic vulnerability to it. Unlike central African Bantu-speakers, for example, southern Africa's mainly Bantu population has a substantial genetic inheritance from the Khoisan (Hottentot and Bushman) peoples whom they pushed out or absorbed during their southward migration several thousand years ago.

This is a plague, and plagues are capricious. Some areas are being hit far harder than others, and southern Africa is being hit worst of all. But magical thinking will not help.