APRIL-MAY2008
Call for End to UNAIDS in British Medical Journal
27 mai 2008 16:57:16 GMT+02:00
christine@aliveandwell.org
Why a UN agency for HIV and not for pneumonia or diabetes, which both kill more people? UNAIDS mandate is wrong and harmful.
Writing in the May 2008 British Medical Journal, health management expert Roger England asserts that the joint United Nations program on HIV and AIDS should be "closed down rapidly." England is chairman of Health Systems Workshop, an independent advisory group on health management in poor countries. According to England,UNAIDS should be disbanded as its mandate is wrong and harmful.
Launched in 1996, UNAIDS is based in Switzerland and works in more than 80 countries worldwide against the alleged spread of HIV and AIDS. Writing in the May 2008 issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), England says the UNAIDS agency was set up on the argument that AIDS and its impact are exceptional and need more attention, effort and funding than all other health threats faced by the world today.
England says AIDS is a major problem in southern Africa, but it is not a global catastrophe. He also asserts that language from a top UNAIDS official that describes AIDS as one of the make-or-break forces of this centurya potential threat to the survival and well-being of people worldwide, is sensationalist.
Worldwide, he states, the number of deaths from HIV each year is about the same as that among children aged under five years in India.
England argues that far too much is spent on HIV relative to other needs and that this is damaging health systems. HIV causes 3.7% of global mortality but receives 25% international healthcare aid and a big chunk of domestic expenditure.
HIV exceptionalism is dead, he says, and the writing is on the wall for UNAIDS. Why a UN agency for AIDS and not for pneumonia or diabetes, which both kill more people?
UNAIDS should be closed down rapidly, not because it has performed badly given its mandate, but because its mandate is wrong and harmful. Its technical functions should be refitted into [the World Health Organization], to be balanced with those for other diseases.
Source:
http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/austria/countries/switzerland/health-expert-calls
-end-un-hiv-programme-$1222028.htm
AIDS Maverick Peter Duesberg
Profiled in Discover Magazine
The June 2008 issue of Discover, currently available on newsstands, features a lengthy, sympathetic and very interesting profile of University of California at Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an expert in retroviruses and the first scientist to openly question the role of HIV in AIDS causation in a paper published in the medical journal Cancer Research in 1987.
Summarizing the original reason for Duesbergs skepticism of the HIV hypothesis, Discover says, He knew that HIV is a retrovirusthe subject of his own heralded researchand that retroviruses dont kill the host cells they infect. If anything, the make them proliferate. That is the opposite of what happens with AIDS where special immune cells are knocked off. The more Duesberg looked for answers, the more he came to believe that the original hypothesis of top AIDS researchersthat, at least in the US, AIDS was brought on by drug use and other immune suppressing causeswas correct...By 1986, after more than two years of research, Duesberg was so convinced that the HIV theory was dead wrong that he spent nine months writing his paper on HIV for Cancer Research.
The article poses bold questions, Could it be, as Duesberg suggests, that the antiretroviral drugs used to attack HIV actually do more harm than good, contrary to the common assumption that they have dramatically reduced AIDS deaths? and includes a summary of his alternative hypothesis of AIDS causation along with an update on his innovative cancer research.
Anticipating that AIDS activists will attack author Jeanne Lenzer and Discover for daring to give coverage and credibility to Dr. Duesberg and the AIDS debate, please consider taking a stand for open dialogue by sending a supportive email to the magazine at